January 4th, 2007 is a day that will go down not just in Alabama Crimson Tide history, but the history of college football.

University of Alabama Athletics Director Mal Moore made the most important hire in his tenure official, introducing Nick Saban as the 27th head coach in Alabama history.

Since then, Saban has won six national championships, nine SEC championships, coached four Heisman winners, 76 first-team All-Americans, and had 123 players drafted with 44 of them in the first round.

Saban has established a standard at Alabama that every other program in the country has tried to replicate, and has led a run of success that had never been seen before in college football and never will be seen again.

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Famously, he told Mal Moore at the time that Moore wanted to hire him that he is far from the best X’s and O’s coach, but that “no one” will out-recruit me. And he was spot-on.

The amount of talent that Saban has brought in year after year and the brand he has established around the University of Alabama is the gold standard model for how to build a championship program.

Often imitated, never replicated.