Men who spend a great deal of time on television tend to cultivate hair styles that look ridiculous in any other setting. This is true of game-show hosts and chatty morning anchors; it is equally true of college football coaches. The iconography of coach hair styles has been varied: Jimmy Johnson’s silver side part, concretized by gel, at the University of Miami, or Pete Carroll’s happy-dude pompadour, at the University of Southern California. But today the essential coif in the game is the imperturbable brown tuft of the University of Alabama’s Nick Saban, which appears on CBS just about every Saturday during the fall, the individual hairs pulling up and away from the coach’s face, as if keeping their distance.

Saban’s hair, and the rest of him, will lead the Crimson Tide into Monday’s title game against the Clemson Tigers, in which Alabama is seeking its fifth national championship in eight years. And yet, as Saban has become the dominant coach in his sport and a singular figure in the Southern cultural landscape, a question has persisted: Why him? Saban, who grew up in West Virginia’s coal country, was a prominent head football coach for two decades, with two successful stints at colleges (Michigan State and Louisiana State) and a mediocre stint in the pros (with the Miami Dolphins), before he set up shop in Tuscaloosa, in 2007. At the time, he was fifty-six years old, and there were few signs that he would become a generational figure. The treatment of sports tactics over the past decade holds that coaches fall into two types: innovators and exhorters. Saban’s reputation is as an excellent defensive coach, but he is not considered especially innovative; he relies instead on the sheer athletic dominance of his recruits. His offense, which is forever switching coördinators and schemes, has never had a cutting-edge reputation.

Charisma-wise, he is a void. Sports Illustrated once named Saban among the thirty-five most disliked figures in sports. When he left Michigan State University for the much higher-profile position of head coach at Louisiana State University, the trustees of L.S.U. sent a private jet to East Lansing, to collect all his old assistant coaches and transport them to Baton Rouge. The pilot had to return empty-handed; not a single assistant would follow him. When profile writers endeavor to describe him, they emphasize his meticulous micromanagement: the timetables he keeps, the opinions he generates about where the welcome tent should be placed when the university hosts a football camp.

Each day, as Brian O’Keefe reported in Fortune, in 2012, Saban sits at the exact same table at the exact same time and eats the exact same lunch: “a salad of iceberg lettuce and cherry tomatoes topped with turkey slices and fat-free honey Dijon dressing.” What kind of Southerner sees the menace in regular-fat honey-Dijon dressing? College football is understood to hinge on the personality of the head coach, who must charm older (mostly white) men into trusting him with their millions, younger (often black) men into trusting him with their bodies, and sideline reporters of all kinds into trusting him with their airtime. And yet success in this field has accrued to a man with the public image of Satan’s dentist.

Certain imperfections in the American social arrangement have been highlighted during the past year. One of them involves television. The common wisdom had been that television was dying, that it had lost its power to arrange a consensus or to identify a star, and then our democracy was upended by a figure who dwelled in the specific ambiguities of the medium: in which accidental celebrity collides with earned fame, and fact and fiction are intermixed. There were other revelations, too—for example, about how television had flattened history into the experience of a single generation, whose life span matched the medium’s own. Last week, the Washington Post’s Sarah Pulliam Bailey visited Mount Airy, North Carolina, Andy Griffith’s home town, which went heavily for Trump, and found a place so fixedly defined by the version of itself that had appeared onscreen that “residents recently opposed a traffic roundabout because there is no traffic circle visible on ‘The Andy Griffith Show.’ ”

Television is the singular fixation of college football. First, conferences began to launch their own networks; since 2011, the Texas Longhorns have had one, too. There are reasons for the association: without the clarifying lens of high-definition, amateur football looks like a messy scrum, and the sport’s nostalgic atmosphere matches the medium’s. But television has an extra influence on the sport. In dictating whose press conferences are covered, whose former players are hired as commentators, whose coaches arrive in the studio for soft interviews during weeks when they have no game, producers set the hierarchy: the S.E.C., then the Big Ten, then everyone else. When the University of Alabama, whose program had suffered from several scandals, hired Saban, in 2007, it made him the highest-paid coach in college football (now he is second, to the University of Michigan’s head football coach, Jim Harbaugh), and placed him at the top of that hierarchy.

That the University of Alabama gave Saban a contract like that seems, from a distance, unlikely: you'd figure that a university from a larger and more prosperous state (the University of Texas, for instance, or Ohio State) might have more to offer. But Alabama had on its side the memory of Paul (Bear) Bryant, the preëminent Southern college football coach of the nineteen-sixties and seventies, an era of social rupture and network television, who developed an outsized cult. Legend has it that Bryant got his nickname when, as a massive thirteen-year-old boy, he volunteered to wrestle a carnival bear at an Arkansas county fair. During his career, he wore a fantastic houndstooth cap on the sidelines, declined to recruit a single African-American player until he was nearly sixty, condescended to female reporters, and cultivated the image of himself as a hard-ass, centered on the brutal ten-day training camp he conducted as the young coach of Texas A. & M. (In 2001, his training camp became the subject of a book, “The Junction Boys,” and an ESPN-produced television movie of the same name.) The memory of Bryant meant that the story of Saban's hire could be told not as a wanton use of taxpayer dollars but as a sort of restoration. Saban was the coach for the era of the Southern financial industry, of the M.B.A. President—his PowerPoints seemed to match the transition that the region, and the country, was experiencing.

Saban’s salary made him the establishment, and the championships he soon started to win cemented a role that suited him: that of the workaholic. Saban does not seem an obviously talented recruiter, given how much the job depends upon charm. At the end of the national championship game in 2013, the contest not officially over but victory secured, two of Saban’s players exuberantly gave their coach the traditional celebratory Gatorade bath, dumping a cooler of the orange liquid over the older man’s head. Saban turned around and fixed his players with the look of a man who has just discovered that his ex-wife’s feng-shui consultant is holding up the lucrative liquidation of their beachfront estate. The announcers, talking over the image, said that Saban planned to celebrate for exactly forty-eight hours, and then get back to work to win the next one. And yet the University of Alabama had the nation's top recruiting class in 2016, 2014, 2013, 2012, and 2011.