Nick Saban has won seven national championships during a career where he’s established himself as college football’s greatest coach.

In only two of those national championships did a Saban-led team go undefeated.

If you’re an Alabama fan licking your wounds after watching a 15-year win streak against Tennessee go up in smoke over the weekend, that gives you optimism moving forward. As Leo McGarry in “West Wing” would say, Saban has been down in the hole before, and he knows the way out.

In my book “The Leadership Secrets of Nick Saban: How Alabama’s Coach Became the Greatest Ever,” one of the chapters, “Don’t Waste a Failing,” is dedicated to how Saban handles losses. They have been few and far between during his incredible run in Tuscaloosa, but there’s a clear playbook Saban draws from that’s instructive on how the Crimson Tide will move forward after Saturday’s 52-49 loss against Tennessee.

Saban began the process Saturday night when he said everything was still on the table for the team. It might feel like the sky is falling in Alabama, but Saban is never particularly emotional after losses. He is coldly rational, evaluating how his program fell short and how he can clean up the issues moving forward. Despite what his sideline antics might imply, the Alabama head coach is not yelling and screaming at everyone right after a loss to make them feel worse. He recognizes everyone is already down, and there is no need to bury them further, instead focusing on ways to improve to ensure that losing feeling doesn’t revisit them.

“It’s really about making guys refocus, whether it was discipline, actions off the field, classroom. All of that is a buildup,” former Alabama receiver Christion Jones told me in the book. “It’s him trying to exploit that situation and letting people know, ‘If we correct this, we won’t be in this situation.’ It’s not about chewing guys out; it’s all about moving forward. What are we going to do this week to eliminate the things that created a loss for ourselves last week?”

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With this Alabama team, Saban has quickly zeroed in on getting the team to play with more fun and less anxiety. He noticed right before his team ran out onto the field against Tennessee, the players weren’t chanting the way they usually would before a game. At that moment, Saban knew his team was tight, and the subsequent play backed that up. It might seem like a small detail, but it explains why this Alabama team has struggled so much on the road, especially with penalties. At the beginning of Saban’s tenure, the Alabama teams were full of “hateful competitors” who fed off the opposing fanbase’s energy and wanted to destroy everyone in the building. This team has shirked in the face of that intensity, an issue Saban has been dealing with throughout the season.

“Not looking at the scoreboard, not worrying about results, not being fearful of what’s gonna happen if something bad happens or if we lose a game,” Saban said. “Just go play, compete, and then when the game’s over, and we do that and do it well as a collective group, we can live with the results. So that’s what it’s our job, my job, to help these players get to that point.”

Alabama has looked wobbly throughout the season, almost losing to Texas and Texas A&M before finally suffering defeat against Tennessee. Saban frequently talks about how hard it is to change behavior when the results are still positive, an issue that last year’s team also struggled with before losing to Texas A&M during the regular season. Saban views the post-loss period as critical to changing behavior because of the collective openness to fix problems that might not have previously been there. He’ll remind them that all their goals are still possible if they immediately commit to doing the things it takes to be the best. One of Saban’s favorite sayings is, “So What; Now What?” After a loss, the now what is always about learning from the mistakes to power growth.

Saban is very good at many things, but handling losses ranks among the biggest reasons he’ll go down as college football’s greatest coach. Mike Vollmar, who worked for Saban at Michigan State and Alabama, says it is the thing he remembers most about his former boss.

“When you’d lose a game, the way he was after was the most incredible thing I’ve seen in a college football coach of the guys I’ve ever worked for,” Vollmar said. “There was a teaching moment, everything that got to that point why we lost the game, and here’s what we’re going to need to do to move on.”

It’s why multi-loss seasons have been so rare during Saban’s time in Alabama. Excluding his first season at Alabama in 2007, Saban has lost consecutive games only once, and that involved the Kick Six and the Sugar Bowl against Oklahoma. Stop for a second and consider how unbelievable it is that Saban never falls into the football cliche of letting a team beat you twice. Since 2010, Alabama has outscored its post-loss next opponent 363-114.

Mississippi State, Alabama’s opponent this weekend, has historically been on the receiving end of an unfair share of those games. Alabama beat Mississippi State in 2010 (30-10), 2011 (24-7), 2019 (38-7) and 2021 (49-9) after losing the previous week. Saban’s teams look to send a message in the aftermath of a loss, much to the chagrin of their poor opponents.

The rare losses have also been a rallying point for teams on their way to championships. Jimmy Courtenay, an offensive lineman on Saban’s 2003 LSU title team, told me that the national championship wouldn’t have happened without a regular season loss to Florida. LSU was feeling good after big wins over Georgia and Mississippi State, and the failure against the Gators made everyone on the team realize to win it all would require a more significant commitment.

“That game reset everybody,” Courtenay said. “It allowed us to start sprinting up the mountain instead of taking the slow trail.”

At Alabama, there have been plenty of similar examples. After a loss to Texas A&M in 2012, Saban challenged the team’s leaders to stand up and say what each was personally going to do to get the team back on track. In 2015, Alabama used the “dynasty is dead” talk following an Ole Miss loss to challenge the team to quiet a growing legion of critics.

“We knew what everybody was saying – it was ‘Alabama’s over, they don’t have it anymore, Saban’s lost it, these guys can’t change with the times, ‘” former Alabama linebacker Keith Holcombe told me in the book. “We heard that, and we did not avoid it. We put it all in the locker rooms.

“It just added fuel to the fire we already had cooking.”

If Alabama is going to meet its lofty preseason expectations, the Tennessee game will be the accelerant to stoke this team’s fire. Losing to Tennessee might feel like a state emergency in Alabama, but Saban has been here before and he knows the way out.

John Talty is the sports editor and SEC Insider for Alabama Media Group. He is the bestselling author of “The Leadership Secrets of Nick Saban: How Alabama’s Coach Became the Greatest Ever.”