When I began as a theology advisor at EWTN in the summer of 2007, the SEC’s dominance of college football was just beginning. Several months earlier, Florida had routed Ohio State (OSU) in the Bowl Conference Series (BCS) Championship 41-14. I’m a graduate of the University of Michigan, which is in the Big 10 Conference, of which OSU is a member too. (A side note: The conference’s name has stayed the same while the number of teams has grown to 14, similar to how the younger Big 12 Conference’s name hasn’t changed despite losing two teams — Missouri and Texas A&M — to the SEC in recent years. In case you were wondering.) 

Anyway, given Florida’s rout over OSU, my newfound buddies at EWTN, which is based in the heart of SEC country (Irondale, Alabama), would razz me about how SEC teams were superior to the “big and slow” teams of the Big 10, citing the Florida win as a prime example. “Speed! Speed! Speed!” one buddy — a Florida Gator fan — said to me with a confident smile, recalling how the Gators’ undeniably swarming defense had ended up dominating OSU. So I had to remind him, and subsequently others at EWTN, that the actual fastest guy on the field that night — Teddy Ginn, Jr. of Ohio State — had returned the opening kickoff for a touchdown — but suffered an ankle injury and was lost for the rest game because of a post-touchdown celebration with some of his teammates in the end zone.

Ginn ran a blazing 4.28 40-yard dash at Ohio State, and he also turned in the fastest offensive play during the 2015 National Football League (NFL) season. Had Ginn not been injured early in the game, his presence as a wide receiver would’ve stretched the Florida defense and I think the game would’ve thus become a shootout, similar to when the No. 1 OSU Buckeyes defeated number No. 2 Michigan 42-39 in a gridiron classic more than a month earlier.

Florida’s win began a string of seven consecutive BCS Championships. No doubt the SEC was the best conference during that run. So it became increasingly challenging to be a Michigan Wolverine in SEC country, including because four of the seven were won by Alabama teams — Alabama (three) and Auburn (one). But because I’ve strived to be a “Faith, Family and Football (in that order)” kind of a guy for many years, I was ready to respond. I would tell my Christian colleagues at EWTN, both Catholic and Protestant, that it took a couple of northern Catholic boys to bring the SEC to their level of national dominance. Indeed, I would tell them with a good-natured smile, “St. Nick” Saban, coach of the Alabama Crimson Tide, is a Catholic who hails from West Virginia, while “Pope Urban” Meyer, named after the several Popes of that name, is from Ashtabula, Ohio; he was also the coach of Florida at the time.

Five of the championships during that seven-year run were won by Saban (three) and Meyer (two), and you can also give Saban partial credit for LSU’s 2008 championship, because the juniors and seniors on Les Miles’ team were recruited by Saban at LSU before he took a brief sojourn to the NFL.

During that SEC reign, in 2010 specifically, I sent a copy of my book on the biblical roots of the Mass to both coaches, affirming them for their witness as faithful family men. Both Meyer and Saban wrote back, and I particularly liked how Saban signed his “Yours in F³” — meaning “Yours in ‘Faith, Family and Football (in that order).’” Among other things in my 2010 letter, I affirmed Saban for making sure that the Sacrifice of the Mass is made available for his players to participate in when they travel for road games, as a priest who celebrated one conveyed to me.

Since then, Meyer retired for health and family reasons, and then a year later, after renewing and strengthening his commitment to his faith and family, unretired when the job of his home-state Buckeyes came open. And when the BCS Championship was replaced with the four-team College Football Playoff (CFP) Championship format beginning in the 2014 season, Meyer and the Buckeyes won the first one, defeating Saban and Alabama in the semifinals and then Oregon for the championship.

Meanwhile, Saban and the Crimson Tide were the 2015 season, defeating Clemson in a memorable 45-40 triumph. And then Saban scored a more important victory this past September, when the new Catholic student center named in his honor opened on Alabama’s campus. Bishop Robert Baker of Birmingham noted that underneath Saban’s often steely public persona is a man of deep Catholic convictions, and Saban said the center would be he and his wife Terry’s legacy.

More recently, Saban’s faith was tested in a very public way when his team lost a thrilling rematch with Clemson in this year’s CFP Championship, 35-31. How would the coach react? I think many people unfairly call Saban arrogant because they see him at football games, when he’s very focused on the game, or at press conferences, which he seems to view as a necessary-but-not-always-likeable distraction from the primary task of forming his players for life — on and off the field. Given his championship at LSU in 2003, this would’ve been Saban’s sixth national championship, a feat more impressive when you consider that he’s done so in the BCS-CFP era, instead of when bowl games didn’t necessarily match the two best — or two of the best — teams in the country, i.e., before the 1998 season.

But if you doubt Saban’s character, see how he reacted after Clemson achieved its victory with a touchdown in the closing seconds of the game. Coaches in college and the NFL usually meet in the center of the field for a brief handshake after a game, something losing coaches don’t relish but almost always do. But when fans mob the field — as happened after Clemson’s win — that’s not always so easy to do, and can even become dangerous when fans get out of hand after a big win.

Saban could’ve easily used the congested field as an excuse to simply head for the locker room. Instead, he showed what exemplifying championship character looks like when it’s toughest for a football coach — after a crushing loss. For several frustrating minutes, which had to feel like a lot longer for him, given the circumstances, Saban sought out Dabo Swinney, the coach of Clemson and himself a committed Christian. Saban persisted until he found him, congratulating Swinney as the two embraced and exchanged words, testifying that the greatest college football coach has his priorities in order.

Thank you, Coach Saban, for your witness, ­including giving the nation an inspiring snapshot of what “Yours in F³” looks like.