Nick Saban is widely regarded as one of the greatest college football coaches of all time, and his coaching tree is one of the most successful in the history of the sport. There are multiple high-level coaches that have worked under the legendary head coach, and some of them are now at national powerhouses.
No Saban staff displays this more than the 2015 Alabama team, which went 14-1 en route to its first College Football Playoff National Championship. Underneath Saban, the coaching staff included Kirby Smart, Lane Kiffin, Billy Napier and Dan Lanning.
Now that's a Coaching Tree. Insane pic.twitter.com/EqBJHtrcgC
— Pick Six Previews (@PickSixPreviews) September 13, 2025
It's been 10 years since that Alabama team lifted the College Football Playoff trophy, and since, all those coaches have went separate ways. Let's dive into how they went from working under Saban to excelling at college football mainstays.
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Alabama 2015 coaching staff
Nick Saban
- Role: Head coach
- Current role: Retired
When Saban retired in 2024, he immediately went down as one of the best college football coaches ever.
Saban has won seven national championships — six at Alabama and one at LSU — and holds the record for the most national championships by any head coach in college football history, which included the Tide's victory in 2025.
The legendary head coach was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 2025, winning seven national championships, 11 SEC titles and five SEC Coach of the Years, along with plenty of other accolades.
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Lane Kiffin
- Role: Offensive coordinator
- Current role: Ole Miss head coach
In 2015, Kiffin led a Crimson Tide offense that averaged over 35 points a game, which included a 45-40 win over No. 1 Clemson in the national championship. Kiffin had many tools at his disposal on offense, including Derrick Henry, who rushed for 2,119 yards and won the Heisman Trophy.
One year after winning the national championship, Kiffin accepted the Florida Atlantic coaching job. He spent three years with the Owls before accepting the Ole Miss job in December 2019.
Kiffin has engineered a historic turnaround for the Rebels, leading the team to three 10-win seasons, a mark of unprecedented success for a program that had only reached that milestone twice in the 50 years prior.
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Kirby Smart
- Role: Defensive coordinator
- Current role: Georgia head coach
Smart served as the Alabama defensive coordinator from 2008 to 2015, winning four national championships as the Crimson Tide defensive coordinator.
He was named the 26th head coach of the University of Georgia in December 2015. Since, Smart is the fastest coach to reach 100 career wins at an SEC school, achieving the milestone in 117 games during the 2024 season. Under his tenure, Georgia has become one of the most dominant programs, including making the College Football Playoff in three out of the past four seasons.
He has led the Bulldogs to three SEC championships and back-to-back national championships in 2021 and 2022. Under Smart, Georgia snapped a 41-year national championship drought.
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Mario Cristobal
- Role: Assistant head coach, offensive line coach and recruiting coordinator
- Current role: Miami head coach
During his time at Alabama, Cristobal served in three roles, but the most notable is recruiting coordinator. In all of his four seasons in Tuscaloosa, the Crimson Tide finished No. 1 in the national 247Sports.com rankings. Cristobal was named the National Recruiter of the Year by 247Sports in the 2015 cycle and in 2016 he was ranked as the No. 2 recruiter in the country.
After Cristobal left, he spent one season as an assistant coach at Oregon before becoming the team's head coach. He served as the Oregon head coach from 2018 to 2021, leading the program to a 35-13 record, two Pac-12 championships and a 2020 Rose Bowl win with Justin Herbert as his quarterback.
In the 2021 offseason, Cristobal left Oregon to become the head coach of Miami, signing a 10-year, $80 million contract with the Hurricanes. In 2024, he led the Hurricanes to their first 10-win season since 2017.
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Billy Napier
- Role: Wide receivers coach
- Current role: Florida head coach
Napier served as the Alabama wide receivers coach from 2013 to 2016, while also spending time as an analyst in 2011. He won two national championships with the program.
In December 2017, Napier was named the head coach of the University of Lousiana at Lafayette. He finished with a 40-12 record with the Cayennes; his is most notable successes at Louisiana include winning the Sun Belt Conference Coach of the Year award in 2019 and guiding the program to the Sun Belt Championship game multiple times.
Napier took the University of Florida head coaching job in November 2021, replacing Dan Mullen. In 2024, with one of the hardest schedules in the country, Napier led the Gators to a 7-5 record and a win in the Gasparilla Bowl.
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Dan Lanning
- Role: Graduate assistant
- Current role: Oregon head coach
Lanning spent the 2015 season as a graduate assistant for the Tide, before getting his first coaching job as an inside linebackers coach and recruiting coordinator at Memphis. He served as the Georgia defensive coordinator from 2019 to 2021, where he won a national championship, before replacing Cristobal at Oregon.
Since taking the helm at Oregon, Lanning has led the Ducks to 9-3, 11-1 and 12-0 regular seasons. In 2024, the Ducks won the Big Ten championship in their first year in the conference and were No. 1 in the College Football Playoff. Oregon lost to the eventual national champions, Ohio State, in the Rose Bowl.
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Mel Tucker
- Role: Assistant head coach and defensive backs coach
- Current role: None
Saban's Alabama staff in 2015 as the Crimson Tide's assistant head coach and defensive backs coach. In his one season in Tuscaloosa, Tucker helped lead the team to a national championship.
His success at Alabama was a springboard to his next coaching roles, where he was named the defensive coordinator at Georgia from 2016-2018. He was hired as the head coach at Colorado in 2019, but his tenure lasted just one season. After compiling a 5-7 record, he left the program to become the head coach at Michigan State. At Michigan State, he led the Spartans to a 11-2 record in 2021 before being fired in September 2023.
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Tosh Lupoi
- Role: Linebackers coach
- Current role: Oregon defensive coordinator
Lupoi has had stints at both high-level college programs and the NFL, and he has been in his role at Oregon since 2022. In the 2023 and 2024 seasons, Oregon was top-20 in America in scoring defense.
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