Cadillac Williams looks back at his relationship with Nick Saban

In the history of the Iron Bowl, you’d be hard-pressed to find two coaches with larger gaps in their experience going up against one another. Nick Saban has been at Alabama since 2007. He has been a head coach every season since 1995, not to mention he was also a head coach in 1990. Saban has been in coaching since 1973, nearly a decade before interim Auburn head coach Cadillac Williams was even born.

The gap in their experience is so great that Nick Saban even recruited Cadillac Williams when he was at LSU. Williams was asked about this, describing their relationship.

“It was actually 2000 in December, and I did [nearly go to LSU],” Cadillac Williams said. “I enjoyed our meeting so much that I actually took an official visit.”

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“Like I say, I respect Coach Saban, just what he stands for, how he challenges players, how he poured into his players, the discipline piece of it, how he’s a no-nonsense guy, and his record and what he got done throughout his career speaks for itself. A man I think very highly of. Got the opportunity to have Ronnie Brown play for him and he enjoyed him, and most of his players that play for him truly enjoy him not only as a coach but as a person.”

Cadillac Williams clearly thinks very highly of Nick Saban, even if he’s never been coached or worked for Saban. He knows that Saban is an incredibly talented coach

At the same time, Cadillac Williams noticed that players love to play for Nick Saban. They also clearly love playing for him too. The energy that Auburn has played with since he took over has been incredible, and the Tigers are riding a two-game winning streak.

Nick Saban praised Williams

Nick Saban sees that his counterpart in the Iron Bowl has done a great job. In particular, Nick Saban praised Cadillac Williams for how he’s gotten Auburn to buy in and compete.

“I think he’s done a phenomenal job. I mean, their guys are really… you look at the competitive character of a team and I think that is a reflection on how someone is impacting the team. And we spent most of our time looking at the last three or four games that they’ve played, and not necessarily the first games that they played. So I’m not making a comparison,” Nick Saban said.

“But their players are really playing hard. They’re playing good football. They’re playing together as a unit, they have confidence, they believe in each other — and that’s why they’ve won two out of the last three games they played and the one they lost they lost in overtime. So they’re playing really well right now and I think you’ve gotta give Cadillac a lot of credit for that. Because that’s not an easy situation that he sort of inherited relative to a changing of the guard right in the middle of the season. To get the players to rally for him in a positive way speaks volumes for the kind of competitive character he has.”