Let’s pretend. It’s January of 2028. Emmy winner Nick Saban is bored. His post-coaching life was fun at first, but playing Pat McAfee’s straight man on ESPN and serving on the President’s Commission on College Sports got old in a hurry. The man who spent his life as part of a team misses the bond that can’t be matched on a TV set or in a boardroom.

Alabama AD Greg Byrne calls. The Crimson Tide football program hasn’t been the same since Saban left the sideline. No SEC championships. Zero national titles. The Bama Standard is a standard no more.

Byrne dispenses with the pleasantries and gets right to the point. Would Saban consider a return for the ages? Would he come back for one last ride?

It almost certainly will never come to that, but if it does, there’s one person Saban should consult beyond Miss Terry and Jimmy Sexton. It’s Paul Mainieri.

Four years ago, Mainieri retired from LSU as an elite college baseball coach, his resume heavy with six SEC Tournament titles, six trips to the College World Series and one national title. That’s more Saban adjacent than equivalent, but still, Mainieri had nothing more to prove.

Fast forward to Tuesday night. There was Mainieri, face flushed, shoulders slumped, trying to find the words to capture his return to the dugout at South Carolina. It had not gone well and ended badly in an 11-3 loss to Florida in the first round of the SEC Tournament.

Mainieri started this season as the active Division I coach with the most career wins and ended it with 29 defeats, the most ever by the Gamecocks. They were a long way from back-to-back natties in 2010 and 2011, and he was light years away from his best days in Hoover in purple and gold.

The soft-spoken head coach, a self-described “optimist by nature,” hit on something simple but profound in his remarks. As he said, “I’m not used to these kinds of seasons, frankly.”

Welcome to the new SEC, where the league’s most competitive sport is now more cutthroat than ever. No matter what you’ve done in the past, you are one injury or transfer or run of bad baseball luck away from an empty, unfamiliar feeling in the pit of your stomach.

See Chris Lemonis. You didn’t see him in Hoover this week with Mississippi State. He was fired on April 28th, four years after doing something the legendary Ron Polk never accomplished during his Hall of Fame tenure, leading the Bulldogs to the 2021 College World Series title.

That State team was part of what has to be the greatest run by any conference in any sport, which continues to this day. You think it was impressive when four different SEC football programs combined to win seven straight national championships from 2006-2012? It was. Terribly impressive. Probably will never happen again.

But that streak was primarily Built By Bama under Saban, the Tide capturing three of those seven crowns. What SEC baseball has done since 2017 is create an ongoing era of extended excellence that defies belief.

Five straight national titles by five different programs – Vanderbilt (2019), State (2021), Ole Miss (2022), LSU (2023) and Tennessee (2024) – interrupted only by the 2020 COVID cancellation. Six of the last seven national championships by six different programs, Florida raising the flag in Omaha in 2017.

The only time in that stretch the SEC didn’t win it all, Arkansas literally dropped a chance to add its name to the list in the championship series. Oh, and Florida, Mississippi State, Ole Miss and Tennessee were first-time national champions.

But wait. As is always the case with SEC baseball, there’s more. Four of the last seven championship series at the College World Series have matched two SEC teams. Of the 14 teams that have reached the championship series since 2017, 11 were SEC members at the time. Oklahoma, which lost the title to Ole Miss in 2022, is now part of the best college baseball conference in the country.

Oh, and so is old-school baseball blueblood Texas, which won the SEC regular-season title in its debut season here.

Given the elevated status of SEC baseball, you have to wonder if Bo Jackson would even play football at Auburn if he were a multi-sport star coming out of McAdory High School today. He might do what he did when he left Auburn after winning the Heisman Trophy and focus first on hardball.

Because no one plays hardball better.