The best college-football game in anyone’s recent memory was played on Saturday night, in the S.E.C. Championship. There were six lead changes. There was Alabama rushing for three-hundred and fifty yards, but scoring the game-winning touchdown on a play-action pass. There was a last-minute Georgia drive that ended at the five-yard line as time expired. The Alabama Crimson Tide will now play in the national-championship game for the third time in four years, with a chance to extend the S.E.C.’s streak of national titles to seven. The game was so impressive that, while ESPN and other neutral observers couched the game as a national semifinal, listeners to Paul Finebaum’s talk-radio show, which I wrote about for this week’s magazine, and other S.E.C. advocates, described Alabama-Georgia as the championship—to be followed by what would amount to an exhibition game against Notre Dame.

Just as impressive as the S.E.C.’s streak, however, is the fact that Alabama’s Nick Saban will now coach in his fourth title game in the past decade. On its face, winning football games at Alabama should not be a difficult task. The school’s tradition and reputation are unmatched; the regional talent base is among the nation’s best; and the fans, deprived of any professional sports teams closer than Atlanta, are rabid. That translates into nearly limitless spending on facilities, recruiting, and the coach’s salary: Saban is the highest-paid in college football. But in the decade prior to his arrival, winning had become a struggle—at one point, the team had four different coaches in four years. With the program on the downswing, wooing Saban back from the N.F.L., where he had gone after winning the national championship at L.S.U. in 2003, became a top priority for Alabama fans. Joe Scarborough, the MSNBC host and avid Alabama fan, wrote an op-ed in the Birmingham News advocating for Saban’s hiring, and appeared on Finebaum’s show to say that he would personally get on a plane to make a direct pitch to the coach.

Today, Saban is widely viewed as the mostly benevolent dictator of one of the most powerful fiefdoms in all of college sports. Sports Illustrated ran an article earlier this season titled “The Sabanization of College Football, ” which discussed how Saban’s mode of operating, which he has named “the Process,” has been imitated by programs around the country. In the six years since his arrival, Saban has nearly doubled the team’s annual revenues, to $124.5 million, according to Forbes. He has been so effective at recruiting players that the N.C.A.A. instituted a new regulation, dubbed the “Saban Rule,” limiting coaches’ access to players at their high schools in the spring. Not to be stopped, Saban started talking with recruits via Skype. There is already a statue of him on campus—a result of his first national-championship win. His wife had it redesigned multiple times to make sure the likeness was adequate, and she succeeded—the coach, in real life, stands five feet six inches tall; the statue adds another three-and-a-half feet. The Sabans expect it to be there for a long time.

The statue sits in front of Bryant-Denny Stadium, in Tuscaloosa, which I visited this summer. The facility isn’t built like the traditional bowls at Michigan or Notre Dame or U.S.C.—it rises up in tiers, like an N.F.L. building. As I walked into the stadium with Cecil Hurt, who has covered the Crimson Tide for thirty years at the Tuscaloosa News, he noted where various expansions had taken place: when Bear Bryant became the coach, in the late fifties, the stadium seated thirty-one thousand. There are now over a hundred thousand seats, and Hurt pointed to various places where future expansion would take place. (Mostly of the luxury-box variety.) Standing in the end zone, I got goosebumps, and there wasn’t even anybody in the seats. I had the same reaction I had while watching John Calipari lead a tour of the new dorm for his Kentucky basketball players: given the choice, why would a high-school athlete go anywhere else?

As we walked off the field, Hurt directed me to a tunnel on the north end of the stadium, leading from the Alabama locker room to a prime section of seats reserved for potential recruits. “Saban told somebody, ‘I want a wow factor when they walk in,’” Hurt said. The tunnel is lined on one side by a wall of the names and photos of recent Alabama players selected in the N.F.L. Draft, like a law school listing the ampersanded firms its graduates have joined. (No school has had a better job-placement rate: eleven Alabama players have been chosen in the first round in the past four years, more than from any other program.) On the opposite wall is a series of images telling the story of Mark Ingram, the 2009 Heisman Trophy winner. You’re meant to understand that this will be your story, too, if you come to Alabama. There’s you playing high-school ball, and being featured in college recruiting magazines. There’s you as a freshman, being named to the conference all-freshman team; and then as a sophomore, winning the Heisman Trophy and a national championship. Eventually, your image is on the cover of a video game, and you’re standing on the stage at Radio City Music Hall with N.F.L. Commissioner Roger Goodell, having been selected in the first round. Just trust “the Process” and all will end well.

Notre Dame, Alabama’s opponent in the national-championship game, has a longstanding process as well, one that has made it one of college football’s most prominent programs. (Between them, Alabama and Notre Dame claim twenty-five national titles.) But as recently as last year, the Irish were a shadow of their once-prominent self, and though Brian Kelly is a great coach, and linebacker Manti Te’o might win the Heisman, it’s difficult to imagine the Irish as anything other than long underdogs against Alabama. They’re battling Saban, for one, and the fact that he’s been in this position three times before, and never lost. We expect he’ll be back again.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.