Nick Saban’s West Virginia roots are still a thing to take a deep dive into. The legendary college football coach stepped into Tuscaloosa and wrote a long-lasting legacy. He clinched seven national championships, 11 SEC championships, and a record of 292–71–1. His contribution to the Tide and the overall college football community will remain unmatched. No matter who takes the reins next (after DeBoer). The standard turned so goated that coaches tend to think twice when accepting a big money offer from the Tide. Especially after DeBoer landed on the other side of the story. It’s tough to replace Saban. However, we are only familiar with one side of the Saban story. His coaching pedigree went from LSU to Miami and then to Alabama. What was Nick Saban before that? Think of a boy next door who used to play freely in the neighborhood of a small West Virginia village.

When you type Nick Saban, there will be an endless list of news and stories. You’ll find out about his epic journey to the helm of football with a career that turns heads. But nothing quite matches the very beginning of a legacy. The grassy turf of the Monongah High School back in 1968 when a young Saban stunned his family and peers by winning the first-ever state championship games.

Nick Saban was born and brought up in the small coal mining town of West Virginia. That’s where the love of football started. His parents acknowledged their son’s talent and didn’t leave any stone unturned to sow a seed of an early football career. Following in the footsteps of the legendary Nick Saban Sr., the former Bama head coach took up football as his life-saving weapon against the brutal reality of his world, and the rest is history.

The soil, the air, and the water of that locality still hold on to the dearest memory of legendary coach Saban. Oh, no! Not Coach Saban. Tom Rinaldi of Fox Sports, who spent a lot of time with Saban, broke down an interesting story about his childhood and the origin of the famous nickname. As David Pollack insisted, Rinaldi started to narrate the behind-the-scenes reality of the ever poker-faced, orotund head coach: ‘‘I had read that he came from a quote-unquote one-spotlight town in West Virginia. And I asked him about it. He had a great line. He just said, ‘No. That’s not true. We are still waiting for the spotlight.’ Which, I thought, was a great line and was true. There is no stoplight in Monongah, where he grew up.”

But the one most captivating piece of detail is Nick Saban isn’t known by his name in his village. For the world, he might be the one and only the irreplaceable, legendary Nick Saban. Rinaldi continued dishing the splash of the conversation with Saban: ‘‘But to his neighbors, he is Brother Saban. ‘You know, if you go back there and ask Nick Saban, no one will think you’re talking about me. I said, really? He said yeah. Everyone will think you’re talking about my father, Big Nick,’ he said. Everybody calls me by a nickname, Brother Sāban.

However, long gone are those days. The flame that started burning from West Virginia eventually came to its peak in Alabama and now burned the ESPN College GameDay tenure after the on-field retirement. The transition from head coach to analyst was pretty natural, as Saban’s prudence about the game demands to be shared on the bigger, wider platform.

Nick Saban receives heat for his inattentive commentary 

Nick Saban has just started off his broadcasting career and has caught strays already. Some viewers have allegedly complained to the FCC about Saban’s use of profanities during the live show. The mogul of this platform, SEC network journalist Paul Finebaum, saw it coming. “I did say something to him at one point before he got on the air that everything he said would be under a microscope,” Finebaum recalled on the Saturday Down South podcast.

“And I think Saban acted like, ‘Well, everything I do is under a microscope.’ But I don’t think he understood, quite frankly, that predictions and idle comments would metastasize in the aggregation world. My guess is he was non-plussed a couple of times by what happened.” Acing a broadcasting role is outright a different ball game than facing a coaching responsibility. It’s okay to make some rookie mistakes in the initial phase, but an esteemed image like Saban’s might take a serious toll on his classic fame and brand value.

To add more insult to the injury, Finebaum deemed Saban’s no longer the “czar of college football. “But he’s done such a good job, and he’s a needed voice. I think maybe we also give him too much credit. I think I will pull out my last remaining hair the next time a coach suggests Nick Saban as czar of college football. It’s not going to happen,” Finebaum said. We will see how Nick Saban gets over all the odds and leaves a mark in the College Game Day endeavor just as he did in traditional football and coaching history.