After Gene Stallings, Alabama football had a difficult ten seasons. Then came the Crimson Tide Restoration led by Nick Saban.
Nick Saban’s impact on Alabama football is immense. To fully appreciate it, look back to the Alabama vs. Auburn series the ten seasons before Saban.
From 1997-2006 the Alabama football record against Auburn was three wins and seven losses. Never before had Auburn won seven of ten games against the Tide. The primary architect of that Auburn domination was Tommy Tuberville.
ICYMI – Earlier segments in our series on Iron Bowl History
The prelude to the Saban years
After being lured away from Ole Miss in 1999, Tommy Tuberville had great success on the Plains. Most painful to Alabama football fans was a string of six straight Auburn victories from 2002 through 2007. In total, Tuberville’s record against Alabama was the all-time best for an Auburn coach (minimum three seasons). He lost his first and last games to the Tide but otherwise, his teams beat Alabama seven out of eight times.
The 2007 Pivot
The rivalry pivoted with the hiring of Nick Saban for the 2007 season. The story of the Crimson Tide Restoration can be told by most any scribe. One wordsmith tells it better than all the rest, Rick Bragg. Explaining the pre-Saban gloom that permeated Alabama football before Saban, Bragg wrote,
"There is no nice way to say it: The Alabama faithful were done with waiting, with mediocrity and with disappointment. They were sick of Auburn, which had beaten them five years in a row; bone weary of NCAA investigations and probations reaching back to 1993; and finished with coaches who could not gut out the expectations here, or who might have done well, someday, with more time or a railroad car full of luck."
After a 17-10 loss to the Tigers in 2007, Saban has gone 7-2 against the Tigers. Nick Saban ended the Auburn coaching careers of Tommy Tuberville and Gene Chizik. A fourth loss by Gus Malzahn on Saturday will almost assuredly seal his same fate.
Is the Iron Bowl CFB’s Greatest Rivalry?
Fans of all college football rivalries believe the one between their team and their team’s most hated foe is unique. The rivalry between Alabama football and Auburn may not be unique but if it isn’t, none of the other great rivalries are either.
Forget the poisoned oak trees, the brick thrown through a coach’s window, the gun battle between opposing fans. None of those extreme and disgraceful occurrences define the Alabama and Auburn rivalry. The game is defined by pain. Not the pain endured by players in the contest, a different pain that once suffered feels as though it will never heal. Pain from a loss shared by players, coaches and fans – pain that subsequent victories abate but do not eradicate.
As Nick Saban says, the hate for losing is stronger than the joy of winning. That is the Iron Bowl.
Next: Alabama Will Beat Auburn
For Alabama and Auburn fans there is nothing, literally nothing like the Iron Bowl. The 364 days after a loss feel like years. Strings of losses over successive seasons become almost unbearable. Paraphrasing Rick Bragg, ‘Saban has brought us forward by taking us back to the glory of our past’ and providing hope for greater glories yet to come.