No one person has done more to dispel silly notion that recruiting success and on-field success aren't correlated than Nick Saban.
It's simply preposterous to argue that Alabama's 10 No. 1-ranked recruiting classes and its six national championships aren't tied at the hip. Per the 247Sports Composite rankings, Saban signed the No. 1 class every year from 2011 through 2017, then again in 2019, '21 and '23. It's simply not a coincidence that Saban, who has signed 73 5-stars and 262 4-stars in his 16 full recruiting classes, also holds the record for most first-round picks by a coach at a single school (44, well above previous record-holder Joe Paterno's 33).
Though Alabama has gone two straight seasons without a national championship -- the horror! -- the recruiting machine shows no sign of slowing. The 2023 class was a 28-man haul with 27 blue-chips, nine 5-stars and 18 4-stars.
Asked about his ability to adapt on the trail in a conversation with Fox Sports's Joel Klatt, Saban... tossed cold water on the whole thing.
"If you had a litter of puppy dogs, how would you sit there and look at them and say which ones are going to be the best hunting dogs and which ones of them aren't? I don't know," Saban said. "Who's making those evaluations? How accurate is it?"
Someone in the recruiting space would argue that if one of those hunting dogs was 6-foot-7, 330 pounds, could throw the shot put 55 feet, reached the state finals in wrestling and could dunk a basketball flat-footed, they could tell you exactly how likely that dog is to hunt. And they're right, to a degree. I remember, years ago, sitting in on a roundtable of recruiting and personnel pros when an executive for 247Sports said that, after years of study, eventual NFL running backs averaged at least 11 years per carry in high school, and so their bar for 5-stars at that position was (among other things) averaging at least 11 ypc.
Saban, though, rebutted that argument by saying that no one can predictively measure how those hunting dogs will take to coaching, adapt to college life, remain healthy, and commit themselves to the process it takes to become a pro. Saban's seen hundreds of his players make the NFL, but he's seen hundreds more fail to reach that level for one reason or another, and it's impossible to predict who's who on signing day.
"Really, the proof is in the pudding once the players get here because the focus has to be on their development, and what do they develop into? That's what we try to stay focused on," Saban said.
As a veteran of many message board flame wars in my day, a common argument by many SEC fans in the early 2010s -- before he'd beaten the rest of us into submission with those half-a-dozen-and-counting titles -- was that Alabama's recruiting rankings were a self-fulfilling prophecy. The Bama Bump, as they called it: a player recruited by Alabama would see his ranking inflate simply because Alabama recruited him.
Turns out, Saban himself believes in the Bama Bump. Saban's always serves his sarcasm extremely dry, so it's hard to tell if he's being genuine here or just poking fun at the entire enterprise.
"I always wonder, does it enhance somebody's recruiting evaluation if they get recruited by the Alabamas and Georgias and Texases of the world? How does that work? I've never ever quite figured that out," he said.
Saban then slipped in to full sarcasm mode.
"It's certainly great for (the media) to be able to rank and rate people and make predictions and all that, and you don't have to live with the consequences of anything. It's just a lot of fun."