Kirby Smart: Best Alabama Teams vs. Today's Top Teams Wouldn't Be Close

Kirby Smart spent nearly a decade as Nick Saban's defensive coordinator at Alabama, winning four national titles and coming close to winning a couple more. But that decade of dominance came well before the era of NIL and the transfer portal. Looking back, Smart believes those teams would wipe the floor with today's top teams.

Appearing on The Next Round, Smart declared that the Alabama teams of 2012 through 2015 would "beat the dog out" of the top teams in college football today. He explained that roster depth just isn't the same as what it once was and the way they practiced back then made them better prepared for the rigors of the season.

"Our best Alabama teams - I'm gonna go 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 - would beat the DOG out of all these teams right now," Smart said.

"Facts"

College football fans looked back fondly on those Alabama teams, which won two national titles and came just a handful of plays away from making reaching one or two more title games over that four-year period. Some noted that Alabama had better backups than many of today's team's starting lineups.

"Them MFs used to have future 1st rounders sitting 12th string on the depth chart lmao," one user remarked on X.

"Why I will never not love and respect Kirby. The best Saban Disciple," wrote another.

"Kirby is gonna trigger a lot of people with this, but good on him," a third wrote.

LSU head coach Lane Kiffin, who worked with Smart in Alabama for two years, also weighed in.

"Facts," Kiffin wrote on X.

That isn't to say that the 2010s were objectively "better" for all of the college football teams. Dominance at the top simply meant that there was a much smaller pool of teams that even had a prayer of contending for anything meaningful, let alone a national championship.

We can debate forever whether the College Football Playoff era with constant transfers and NIL enticement has made the sport better or worse, but it has made teams that never would have had a chance in hell of competing a decade ago into teams that can actually dream of winning a national title.

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This story was originally published April 30, 2026 at 7:44 AM.