Of the hundreds of players Nick Saban has coached during his 16 seasons at Alabama, few are spoken about in the way Saban describes Will Anderson.

“I don’t ever think there’s a perfect player, aight, but …” Nick Saban began one night in September 2021.

The outside linebacker whom Saban first referred to by his jersey number, and later graduated to being called “Will,” had earned something even greater from his coach.

“That guy is the ultimate competitor,” Saban continued. “He’s a warrior — what I call a warrior. For me, that’s a tremendous compliment to a guy.”

Three games into Will Anderson’s sophomore season, Saban had seen enough. Anderson had played through an injury to help Alabama win a road game at Florida, and the budding star pass rusher had already clearly established himself as one of Saban’s favorite players to ever have coached.

But it was a different moment months later when Anderson realized he had reached rare status in the mind of college football’s most accomplished coach of this era.

On a night most Alabama fans would rather forget, it was a gesture that Tide fans remember well: Saban holding back Anderson and Bryce Young from leaving their postgame news conference after a national championship game loss to Georgia.

“I’d like to say something,” Saban asked a College Football Playoff moderator late on the night of Jan. 10, 2021. “Can I say something?

“These two guys that are sitting up here: they’re not defined by one game. These guys played great for us all year. They’re great competitors. They were great leaders on this team. They contributed tremendously to the success of this team, and we would not be here without them. Both of them take responsibility for the loss, but both of them contributed in a lot of ways in a positive way to giving us a chance to win, a chance to be here to have an opportunity to win.

“I just want to thank them for that and let everybody know how proud I am of these two guys.”

Anderson responded with a “thank you, Coach,” but the impact of Saban’s words resonated far beyond that.

“I kind of felt like that’s when my relationship with Coach Saban, it kind of changed a little bit,” Anderson explained last week in a wide-ranging interview before the Sugar Bowl.

Why?

“I just think I’d had seen how much he respected me and Bryce on a different level,” he responded. “It kind of took me by surprise. I wasn’t expecting that. Coach Saban’s always been really good to me. I’ve never had an issue with Coach Saban. I’ve never been one of those players, like, ‘Coach Saban is this, Coach Saban is that.’ I just think at that moment, it was really, like, dang. Coach Saban is one of the best coaches in college football, and he just stood up in front of millions of people that’s watching this — or is gonna see it — and just said this about us.

“It just made me want to go harder for not only him, but also for my teammates and this program and the University of Alabama.”

Anderson and Young made that commitment evident when they decided to play in the Tide’s non-playoff bowl game this season, despite their locked-in status as top-5 NFL draft picks this spring.

That is not to say their choices would have been any different had it not been for Saban’s words after the Georgia loss, but for Anderson, it brought his relationship with his coach to a new level.

“Me and him got really close after that,” Anderson said.

How so?

“It’s not a time that I can’t go into Coach Saban’s office now and talk to him,” he said. “He’ll listen to me and ask me stuff, and everything like that. He has so much respect for me, and I have so much respect for him, and it’s so easy for us to get along because we share the same mentality. We’re the same competitor. He absolutely means the world to me and my family.”

When Anderson’s grandmother died not long after he arrived at Alabama as a freshman, Nick and Terry Saban sent flowers to the Andersons’ home, he recalled.

“That just goes to show the person Coach Saban is, that a lot of people may not see or a lot of people may not know,” Anderson said. “He’s really a great guy, a great coach and to play for the ‘G.O.A.T.’ has been absolutely amazing. There’s no other coach I’d rather be coached by than Coach Saban.”

Mike Rodak is an Alabama beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mikerodak.