Why Alabama Football Never had a 73-0 Shutout Under Nick Saban

If you’re an Alabama Crimson Tide football fan who has a feel for program history, the following probably got your attention after Alabama’s home opener against Louisiana Monroe last Saturday: The 73-0 score was the largest margin of victory in a shutout in program history, surpassing the previous mark of 66-0 against California on Sept. 15, 1973.

That’s right, the old record didn’t just date back 50-plus to the Paul W. “Bear” Bryant era, but he still had 10 years of coaching remaining. Since then we also went through Ray Perkins, Bill Curry, Gene Stallings, Mike DuBose, Dennis Franchione, Mike Shula and the entire Nick Saban dynasty for that 66-0 score to be topped.

The biggest shutout under Saban from 2007-23 was 59-0, which happened twice. The most recent was at Vanderbilt in 2017, but the other will probably surprise few of you to learn that it came against a ranked opponent. On Oct. 18, 2014, Alabama absolutely crushed No. 21 Texas A&M. The Crimson Tide had some extra motivation as it was the Aggies’ first return visit to Bryant-Denny Stadium after they pulled off the 29-24 upset in 2012 with quarterback Johnny Manziel.

But Saban could have essentially picked the final score, just like so many other times at Alabama. Consider the following:

It was one of seven times the Crimson Tide scored 50 points against ranked opponents under Saban.

Alabama scored 40 more points in 52 of his final 83 games as a head coach, which easily led college football during that time period. In case you’re wondering, that’s 62.7 percent of the Crimson Tide’s games between 2018-2023.

The most points a Saban-coach team ever scored was 66, but it happened three times: against Ole Miss (2017), Western Carolina (2019), and Chattanooga during one his final games leading the Crimson Tide in 2023.

So why didn’t we ever see a 73-0 score, or more?

1) The Process

Part of Saban’s message to his players was to play every play at the best of their abilities, and ignore the scoreboard. This was the man who in the final seconds of the 2011 title game against LSU, and the 21-0 outcome was no longer in doubt, went ballistic on the sideline on a player who got called for a sloppy penalty.

A few years later, Week 2 of the 2016 season, Alabama was only up 38-10 in its home opener against Western Kentucky when Saban didn’t wait for the locker room to let offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin know that he wasn’t pleased with how the offense performed. When asked about it Saban responded: “There were no arguments. Those are called ass-chewings.”

2) Saban never forgot what that kind of loss feels like

Go back to 1995. Saban’s first game as a head coach at Michigan State was at home against juggernaut Nebraska under Tom Osborn. The reigning national champions were coming off a perfect 13-0 season, and about to repeat with another undefeated season, The Cornhuskers destroyed the Spartans 50-10.

“The score did not indicate how bad they beat us,” Saban said. “I hadn’t been in college football for four or five years, being in the NFL. I’m thinking we’re never going to win a game. We’ll never win a game here at Michigan State. I must have taken a bad job, wrong job, no players, something.

“I remember Coach Osborne when we shook hands after the game, he put his arm around me and whispered in my ear, ‘You’re not really as bad as you think.’ So I think he knew he had a pretty good team, and we actually ended up winning six games, so we weren’t really probably as bad as I thought.”

The teams played again in Week 2 of the 1996 season to complete the home-and-home, and the Cornhuskers won 55-14. For the second straight year, Michigan State came back to win six games and play in a bowl game, but they were the two most lopsided losses of Saban’s college coaching career.

So go back to the 59-0 thrashing of Texas A&M at Bryant-Denny Stadium, in many ways it was typical of how Saban handled blowout games. With Alabama ahead 45-0 at halftime, the first-team offense took one series in the second half, going 57 yards on just three plays with Blake Sims and Amari Cooper connecting on a 45-yard touchdown, and then sat down.

The players who came in mostly ran down the clock, with the Crimson Tide attempted just eight passes the rest of the game. Alabama scored a final touchdown with 4:16 remaining, a 14-yard touchdown pass from reserve quarterback Jake Coker to Ty Flournoy-Smith.

“I think this is as close as we can get to the Alabama football that we want to try to get from our players in terms of effort, toughness, emotional excitement and execution that we got throughout the game,” Saban said during his postgame press conference.

Although coming in Texas A&M had the nation’s No. 4 offense, Alabama set a school record for points in a quarter with 35 in the second. It was the Crimson Tide’s largest margin of victory since a 62-0 defeat of Tulane in 1991.

So yes, Saban held back … a lot, and he’s not necessarily unique in that respect. But it was probably more than most realized, and with good reason.

“They’re competitors. They have moms and dads. They have pride in performance. They have things that they want to accomplish and they want to do and they want to be good. They don’t just throw in the towel. They work harder to try to get better. And everybody wants to beat us. So, we’re going to get everybody’s best game, and I don’t know why people don’t understand that,” Saban said on his radio show near the end of his coaching career. “You could say it’s not fair to our players that they get everybody’s best game, but they do, and they have to be able to compete through that and play over that.

“When I came here, everybody was happy to win a game. Now we’re not happy to win a game any more. We’re not happy to win a game at all. We think we should win games by whatever. And I don’t think that’s fair to the players either because our players w