College Football

RJ Young: The game that nearly broke Nick Saban, paved way for Alabama's dynasty

Updated Feb. 15, 2024 11:25 a.m. ET

Before the six college football national championships spanning the BCS and College Football Playoff eras, before the 11 SEC championships and dozens of high school recruits turned into future NFL stars, before just about everything that made Nick Saban's Alabama the standard of college football, there was this:

Louisiana-Monroe 21, Alabama 14.

That was what the scoreboard at Bryant-Denny Stadium read when the clock hit triple zeroes on Nov. 17, 2007, amid Saban's first year in Tuscaloosa. It was, by any standard, a humiliation for Saban.

Alabama entered that matchup favored by 25 points at home in a classic SEC "buy game" against an overmatched Sun Belt opponent, a team the Crimson Tide had blown out under Saban's predecessor Mike Shula. Instead, the end result prompted billboards with the message "Tide Rolled!" as college football analysts wondered if Saban's 2003 national title run at LSU was the exception, not the rule, for the head coach.

It's the type of loss that, even when coming in a football coach's first season, can come to define that coach's entire tenure like a dark cloud that never lifts. And as FOX Sports college football analyst and host of the No. 1 CFB Show RJ Young examines in a new video essay, that loss did define Saban's tenure at Alabama — in a very different manner.

Saban, of course, went on to transform the sport both on the recruiting trail and the field, winning six national championships and turning Alabama into an unprecedented powerhouse before his retirement in January at 72 years old. The Crimson Tide did not lose to an unranked opponent again for 14 years and still have not lost to a non-Power 5 opponent since that fateful day in 2007.

As Young explains in his essay, Alabama's stunning loss to Louisiana-Monroe and the team's subsequent run of dominance were very much connected. Here's an excerpt:

But that was also the last time Nick Saban coached an Alabama team that would get beat by simply not playing to the standard, and if you needed a reminder, the hell-raising, fully-focused and fanatical Saban was there with a swift kick in the behind and fury blind to scream: The standard is perfection. He relentlessly preached that you're not playing to the scoreboard. You're playing to the whistle. You're not playing against Auburn. You're playing against this play. Like Joseph Campbell taught us, you’re not playing down to the man. You're playing up to the man you must become.

You can watch the full video essay below.