In celebration of a new CFB season and Alabama Football

It is not quite Alabama football season yet, but today is the day CFB returns. Week zero officially ushers in a new college football season. Unlike past week zero slates, Aug. 27 has a big game. Northwestern and Nebraska are playing in Ireland. Both of the Big Ten teams need to open with a win, especially the Cornhuskers.

Alabama football fans will have some interest in two other games. Austin Peay is at Western Kentucky and UConn is at Utah State. The late game in the first Saturday slate is Vanderbilt at Hawaii. Many Alabama Crimson Tide fans watching the late game will find it easy to root for the Dores.

A light weekend, easing back into college football is a great time for Tide fans to celebrate the program’s almost incredible success. No other program can rightfully claim the two best coaches in the history of college football.

What Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant and Nick Saban have done is not only phenomenal, there appears to be no end in sight.

Alabama’s total of National Championships allows some debate in a season or two. Before the BCS in 1998, there were many seasons without a consensus National Champion. With so many multiple champions in so many seasons, quibbling over whether the Crimson Tide should claim 1934 and 1941 matters little. For the record, claiming 1941 is not defensible. A better claim would be 1945 or 1966, but …

Alabama Football and the SEC

What is not in dispute is how Alabama Football has dominated the SEC. Including shared titles, Alabama has been the SEC Champion 29 times. Far behind are two other SEC programs, whose SEC titles combined do not match the Crimson Tide. With 13 SEC titles each are Georgia and Tennessee. LSU comes next with 12, including one under Nick Saban. Florida and Auburn have eight each. Though the most recent was in 1963, Ole Miss has six. The only other SEC programs having won a football title are Kentucky (Bryant was the coach) and Mississippi State, with one each.

Note: Going back to 1933, there have been 100 outright or shared SEC Champions. One in 1984, won by Florida was vacated due to NCAA violations.

SEC Titles and SEC Coaches

• Paul Bryant won 14, including 13 with the Crimson Tide. A definition of dominance is the Tide’s SEC Championship performance from 1971-1979. In eight of those nine seasons, Bryant’s teams were SEC Champions.
• Nick Saban has nine SEC Championships, including the one with LSU in 2003.
• Next in SEC titles are John Vaught (Ole Miss), Vince Dooley (Georgia) and Steve Spurrier (Florida), each with six.
• General Robert Neyland won five SEC titles at Tennessee, despite taking a break for WWII service. He won two other conference titles in Knoxville before the SEC was formed.
• Auburn’s Pat Dye won four SEC Championships.

Bryant and Saban are the SEC win leaders while coaching SEC programs. Bryant won 232 in Tuscaloosa, plus 60 more at Kentucky. Saban is a reachable distance behind Bryant’s 232 Alabama wins and 292 SEC wins. Saban has 183 Crimson Tide wins plus 48 more from LSU.

Only four SEC football coaches have ever won more than 200 games as SEC head coaches. They are Bryant and Saban, followed by Steve Spurrier (208 wins) and Vince Dooley (201 wins).