Auburn Tigers coaching legend Pat Dye saw Nick Saban's potential to be an all-time great. As Jacksonville State's new head football coach, Charles Kelly, shared, Dye called Saban the best and urged him to learn from the Alabama Crimson Tide football dynasty's architect long before Dye's passing in 2020.
“He had coached at Alabama with Coach (Paul) Bryant and then came to Auburn,” Kelly said during a recent talk with members of the Alabama Sports Writers Association, per AL.com. “And he had a lot of respect for Coach Saban and what he was as a coach. (Dye) just told me, ‘you go up there and learn as much as you can. He’s the best. You’ll be trained well.’
“He told me ‘the greatest coaches I’ve been around, they learned more after they were 50 years old than they did before, I was 51 when I started working for Coach Saban. I worked for some great head coaches and I learned from all of them. But I learned more after I was 50 years old than I had in all the years before. And it made sense to me then."
Dye was one of the all-time great SEC coaches to never win a recognized national championship. Still, he coached Bo Jackson and is now memorialized with the field at Jordan-Hare Stadium.
Clearly, his foresight was part of what made him so good.
Saban has tormented Tiger fans for nearly two decades from the other side of the Iron Bowl rivalry. Even in his broadcast career, he's throwing hexes on Auburn.
No self-respecting Tiger fan would ever deny his greatness, though.
Dye knew. And, clearly, Kelly caught on after joining him to help build one of the Crimson Tide's last great defenses in 2020 during his four-year run in Tuscaloosa.