How the World Has Changed Since Nick Saban Wasn't the Head Coach at Alabama
It's been a long, long time since Alabama entered the college football season without Nick Saban at the helm.
The future Hall of Fame coach won six of his seven national championships with the Crimson Tide, who took home nine SEC titles in 17 seasons after they hired Saban away from the Miami Dolphins on Jan. 3, 2007 and before he retired in January.
Alabama remains one of the favorites by the college football championship odds ahead of its first year under Kalen DeBoer, whose team enters Saturday as a 31.5-point favorite to beat Western Kentucky. Yet things will certainly look different without the greatest coach of all time roaming the sidelines.
That got us thinking: what else has changed since the last time Saban wasn't the coach at Alabama? Here's a look at 10 ways life was different before he took the job:
The last time Nick Saban wasn't coaching Alabama ...
The average price of gas was $2.24 per gallon.
We'd all love to return to a time when gas prices were more than a dollar cheaper per gallon than they are today, but that wasn't how folks felt back in 2007.
Just two years earlier, gas had never before exceeded $2 per gallon on average, but worldwide demand for oil drove prices to as high as $4 per gallon in the summer of 2008 before they returned to "normal" in the late 2010s.
While today's prices could be worse all considered, it's safe to say that $2 gas - like Saban's coaching career - will live on in memory only.
The median home price in America was $257,400.
That might seem like a bargain in hindsight, especially with modern home prices exceeding $400,000 on average.
Yet this was actually the high-water mark for housing prices before the 2008 financial crisis, which saw home values drop by nearly 20% over 24 months.
It wasn't until 2013 - after Saban had won his third BCS Championship in four years with the Crimson Tide - that the average sale returned to those early 2007 prices.
The iPhone hadn't been announced yet.
When Saban took the job at Alabama, Apple was days away from revealing what would eventually become its flagship product: the iPhone.
Steve Jobs debuted the revolutionary smartphone at the Macworld convention in San Francisco on Jan. 9, 2007, and it was released in the U.S. to much fanfare in late June.
Consider that the App Store didn't even come out until 2008 - the same year the iPhone added 3G and GPS technology. Boy, how things have changed since then.
MySpace was the 3rd-most popular website in the world.
With more than 1 billion visits in January 2007, MySpace trailed only Google and Yahoo in terms of monthly online traffic.
At that point, Facebook (2004) and Twitter (2006) were in their relative infancy, while MySpace drew more than 75 million unique visitors per month by 2008 and reached a peak valuation of $12 billion.
It all came crashing down for the social media giant in the 2010s as the likes of Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter (X) rose to power. In 2011, MySpace sold for roughly $35 million, and it was sold again in 2016 for just $87 million.
Netflix was a DVD rental service, and Hulu didn't exist.
It seems hard to imagine in our cord-cutting world today, but streaming services didn't really exist when Saban first stepped foot in Tuscaloosa.
Netflix ended its DVD rental service last year, but entering 2007, its entire business model was mailing movies to customers who preferred to skip the trip to their local Blockbuster Video (RIP).
On Jan. 16, 2007 - a few days after Saban was hired - Netflix launched its on-demand streaming service with 1,000 films available, less than 1.5% of its DVD portfolio.
Hulu launched its own streaming service that October. Amazon Prime Video, which launched as "Amazon Unbox" in September 2006, didn't take off until it rebranded a few years later.
'Irreplaceable' by Beyonce was No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100.
Beyonce topped the American charts with her fourth No. 1 single and the most commercially successful song in the U.S. in 2007.
Originally released on Oct. 23, 2006, "Irreplaceable" was certified double-platinum and spent 10 consecutive weeks atop the Billboard Hot 100. The pop classic, which became an anthem of female empowerment, was also the most downloaded female ringtone of the decade.
It held the top spot on the Hot 100 chart until the final week in February, when "Say It Right" by Nelly Furtado ascended to No. 1.
'Night at the Museum' was the top movie at the box office.
Night at the Museum, which originally released nationwide on Dec. 22, 2006, owned the box office in the first week of a truly monumental year in film.
While the quirky Ben Stiller flick was the fifth-highest grossing film released the year before, it didn't hold a candle to the top movies from 2007. Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third, and Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End all came out in May in a record-setting month for the movie industry.
Ratatouille, Transformers, and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix hit theaters in consecutive weekends that July in a ridiculous run for cinephiles.
Guitar Hero 2 was the top-selling game on PlayStation 2.
The second edition of the groundbreaking Guitar Hero franchise - or, more specifically, the bundled verson - was the most popular game for the PlayStation 2 entering 2007, while Microsoft exclusive Gears of War was the top title for the Xbox 360.
It was a banner year for video games in general. Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare - two of the highest-rated games of all time - topped the charts in 2007, which also saw the debut of Assassin's Creed, BioShock, Mass Effect, and Portal.
None of those could compete with the worldwide sales for Wii Sports, which sold more than 15 million copies that year after the Nintendo Wii came out in November 2006.
The Miami Dolphins were entering Year 3 of the Nick Saban era ... right?
It's easy to forget now after Saban built the most impressive resume in college football history, but he was coming off an uninspiring two-year run in Miami when he bolted for the collegiate ranks.
Saban went 15-17 in two seasons with the Dolphins, who were led by starters Gus Frerotte and Joey Harrington under center in those two seasons. So when one of the best jobs in college opened up, he jumped for it - even as he explicitly denied that he would do so multiple times on the way out the door.
Ironically, Saban replaced former Alabama coach Mike Shula, whose dad Don Shula led the Dolphins to two Super Bowls and a perfect 17-0 record in 1972.
The Florida Gators were closing in on a BCS Championship.
Technically, the Texas Longhorns were the defending champions when Saban took the job at Alabama on Jan. 3, 2007 - days before the Florida Gators blew out Ohio State to win their first of two BCS Championships under Urban Meyer.
Meyer would later switch sidelines and coach the Buckeyes to the first championship by any team in the College Football Playoff era, beating Saban's Crimson Tide in the semifinal before trouncing Oregon in the 2014 final.
Alabama responded with seven CFP appearances over the next nine years, winning nine playoff games with six championship appearances and three titles - all the most by any program over the last decade.
