At least Bill Belichick had the decency to fall off at the end. In his last four years as the czar of the New England Patriots, the six-time Super Bowl winner suffered three losing seasons, including a 4-13 collapse in 2023; that means that his freshly named successor, Jerod Mayo, can at least find some room for improvement while fighting through all the thick brush and overcoming all the requisite shadows that come with succeeding such a legendary figure.
Kalen DeBoer won’t get that luxury at Alabama. For Nick Saban, “falling off” meant “losing to Texas and finishing 11-2 but still beating Georgia, winning the SEC and reaching the College Football Playoff.” DeBoer brought Washington to the national title game in 2023 but now fills the desk of a coach who went to the title games 10 times, winning seven.
Acknowledging that the sport is evolving more quickly than ever at the moment — Tom Osborne didn’t retire from an NIL universe, Woody Hayes wasn’t winning titles in a transfer portal era, etc. — one constant in college football and generally all of sports is that successfully succeeding a legend is nearly impossible. The expectations you inherit are almost impossibly high, and fans who are accustomed to not only winning but doing so in a very specific way are prepared to nitpick every change and fuss over every setback. Even if you win big, you might not be totally accepted, and you probably won’t be fully accepted.
To look at how things usually go for schools losing historically great coaches, let’s look back at nine particularly relevant examples of teams that lost a coach who had won them multiple national titles. I’ll avoid looking at Oklahoma after Barry Switzer, USC after Pete Caroll and Penn State after Joe Paterno, since all three schools were dealing with NCAA infractions issues at the time.
None of these directly apply to Saban — none of these schools were losing the greatest college coach of all time like Alabama, in other words — but they tell interesting stories. For each, we’ll look at the decade before each legendary coach’s arrival and the 20 years (if applicable) after their departures.
Notre Dame had battled ups and downs in the 10 years since Knute Rockne’s death following the 1930 season. But Leahy, a tackle for Rockne in the late 1920s and an immediate success in two years at Boston College (where he went a combined 20-2), was custom-made to thrive in South Bend. And that’s what he did. The five years following World War II were probably the best in program history. And after a brief downturn at the start of the 1950s, he pulled off two more top-five finishes in 1952-53 before retiring for health-related reasons.
The school didn’t look far to replace him, hiring 25-year old Terry Brennan, a former Leahy halfback and the coach of the freshman team in 1953. He enjoyed a top-five finish in 1954 but averaged just 5.8 wins per year afterward and was dismissed after five years. NFL coach Joe Kuharich, another former Irish player, followed but went a dire 17-23 in four seasons. Another coach heavy with Notre Dame ties, Hugh Devore, lasted just one year, going 2-7. It wasn’t until Notre Dame went outside the family and hired Northwestern’s Ara Parseghian — whose Wildcats had gone 4-0 against the Irish in recent years — that the program began to get back on track. They would win be national champion again by 1966, 13 years after Leahy’s departure.
