On Wednesday afternoon, news broke that the greatest coach in the history of college football was retiring. On Thursday morning, news broke that the greatest coach in the history of professional football was retiring (or possibly being retired, but he will no longer be coaching regardless). These are not stories related to the St. Louis Cardinals.

But the retirements of Nick Saban and Bill Belichick are prominent sports stories, and the careers of the two men, which intersected at multiple points–Saban served as defensive coordinator under Belichick for four seasons in the 1990s with the Cleveland Browns and the two were division rivals for two seasons in the 2000s with Saban at the helm of the Miami Dolphins and Bill Belichick in his iconic role as head coach of the New England Patriots–provide some level of instruction across sports, even if the sports involved are very different.

Because of both the higher popularity of and the higher emphasis on scripted plays in football, Saban and Belichick are more famous than any baseball manager, but the closest modern equivalent for the St. Louis Cardinals was the (eventually aborted) retirement of Tony LaRussa, who retired from baseball after his 2011 World Series victory. Although neither Saban nor Belichick went out on top–Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide had a conference-winning 2023 but they lost in the semifinals of the College Football Playoff, and the less said about the 2023 New England Patriots, the better–the parallel is that Tony LaRussa retired with a reputation as an innovator, as somebody who excelled and changed the role of the Major League Baseball manager.

The same cannot be said when Mikes Matheny and Shildt lost their jobs as Cardinals manager, though this is an unfair ask of them–even good managers are rarely perceived as important ones. If Oli Marmol lost his job as St. Louis Cardinals manager, he would align closer to the Matheny and Shildt categorization than the LaRussa one. But taking the lesson from the careers of Nick Saban and Bill Belichick that baseball teams should simply hire slam-dunk Hall of Fame managers is fairly glib. What makes Saban and Belichick interesting is their lack of distinct features.

College football’s legendary coaches have been synonymous over the years with certain styles, whether it was Tom Osborne’s I-formation triple option attack, Barry Switzer’s preference for the split-back wishbone offense, or Steve Spurrier’s pass-happy “Fun-n-Gun”, but Nick Saban’s style oscillated–his earlier Alabama teams were defined by fairly standard single-back offenses carried by the likes of Mark Ingram, Trent Richardson, and Eddie Lacy, where his later years were defined by dynamic quarterbacks, two of whom (Tua Tagovailoa and Jalen Hurts) will start NFL playoff games this weekend.

When I was growing up, I believed that the way to define a great coach is those who won with less talent–say, Bobby Knight spending his entire illustrious college basketball coaching career leading Isiah Thomas and precisely no other truly significant NBA players (all due respect to Calbert Cheaney). I bought the argument that Phil Jackson wasn’t a great NBA coach since he got to lean on teams loaded with superstars. But I have evolved to the position that while the ability to coach non-superstars is indeed an admirable skill, you would rather have the coach who can handle elite talent because elite talent will allow your team to succeed far more. The hiring of MLB managers has largely followed a trend towards fairly moderate expectations of what one can do–the purpose is not to find somebody who can turn a true-talent 70-win team into a perennial playoff team (impossible) but rather to find somebody who can allow a talented team to thrive by avoiding mistakes all the way to a championship (somebody has to do it every year). Like most people, Nick Saban does not subscribe to a belief that a certain style of football is more fundamentally pure than another; whether your offense runs a pass-heavy spread offense or something that looks more like a rugby scrum than a modern play, the key is making it work for you. He adapted his style because it allowed him to use the most talent that he could; he adapted (in sharp contrast to long-time rival and Alabama alum/guy-who-five-years-ago-seemed-like-a-lock-to-succeed-Saban Dabo Swinney) to the era of college football players receiving legal payment because that was how to make the team as good as it could be.

Professional football is a little bit trickier in that one’s own success imposes restrictions on your ability to acquire talent (lower draft picks, a strict salary cap, the draft picks the Patriots lost due to cheating which I as a St. Louis Rams fans through and through am legally required to note), whereas in college football it’s the opposite since most players want to play for good teams. Bill Belichick’s later NFL years were defined by the organization’s brain drain, but during the Patriots’ peak, the team was a bona fide juggernaut. And while Belichick’s reputation was largely built around discovering diamonds in the rough–an endless supply of small white receivers and most famously Tom Brady–he was extremely happy to bring in superstar talent even at times when it wasn’t necessarily popular. The Patriots traded for Corey Dillon, who had criticized Cincinnati Bengals ownership at his previous stop, and he immediately became the team’s most productive running back. When Randy Moss had worn out his welcomes in Minnesota and Oakland, he turned into a mega-star in New England. LeGarrette Blount was largely known for an on-field incident in college where he punched two Boise State fans after a game, but this did not preclude the Patriots from trading for him.

(Belichick also cut Aaron Hernandez literally an hour and a half after he was charged with murder, for those of you who might want to justify the Cardinals signing a wildly unpopular free agent pitcher)

Nick Saban and Bill Belichick, the latter in particular, were famously not dynamic interviewers as coaches, but in terms of the task at hand, they were highly elastic. The goal was to win games and they were never so beholden to their own notions of what has worked in the past to eschew what should work in the future. They lacked Al Davis’s showman nature but they embodied his ethos–just win, baby.

The St. Louis Cardinals have a type when it comes to players, though that type differs at least somewhat from the broader stereotype around them. Their type has differed throughout the years–most famously, the Cardinals of the 1980s were built around team speed to an extreme degree otherwise never seen in Major League Baseball–but has been broadly similar since 1996, when the Cardinals hired Tony LaRussa as manager. The Cardinals believe in buying low on starting pitching and rehabilitating the perceptions (and in some cases, a la Chris Carpenter, the throwing arms) of pitchers. The Cardinals believe that selling players on St. Louis can best be achieved via the lived experience of it–the Cardinals traded for soon-to-be free agents like Mark McGwire, Jim Edmonds, Scott Rolen, Matt Holliday, and Paul Goldschmidt and believed (correctly, in these cases) that they would want to remain Cardinals.

There is a fallacy–I’m not sure what it would be called, but it’s something of a mirror image of the gambler’s fallacy–that believes that the St. Louis Cardinals, by virtue of having won the second-most championships in baseball history, are destined to continue to be a great team forevermore. A majority of the Cardinals’ championships happened before Major League Baseball was integrated, before games were televised, before virtually anybody reading this was born. The Cardinals play in a below-average television market by size among MLB teams, and the organization’s payroll, despite what whichever Bill DeWitt happens to be hanging around at the moment says, has been in steady decline relative to the rest of the league. This is a team that finished twenty games below .500 last season with a roster where three of the four most productive players are over 30, and the verdict around baseball seems to be that the Cardinals are likely to bounce back for the simple reason that this is the Cardinals and they are always good.

The Cardinals organization seems to believe that their plan remains solid, but results have been diminishing. Matt Holliday and Paul Goldschmidt signed extensions with the team that worked out, but a huge part of the supposed strength that the Cardinals were flexing–that players would take less to be in St. Louis–does not seem to have been the case with these players, who signed essentially market-level contracts. Their team ERA for starting pitchers in 2023 ballooned to over five, by far the worst of the post-Dave Duncan era, and while this was so extreme that it probably qualifies as an outlier, their run prevention has been in steady decline.

Even great organizations run into ruts, but what the likes of Nick Saban and Bill Belichick did was to figure out where their teams were lacking and build off of that. The plan wasn’t to blow everything up–with the possible exception of the 2023 Patriots, neither coach ever had bad teams during their legendary tenures–but rather to find fixable holes. When Alabama’s dominance in the Southeastern Conference was challenged by Georgia, they reloaded–speaking of recently-retired college coaching legends, Duke’s Mike Krzyzewski is perhaps the most notable example of revamping one’s strategy, going from building around four-year college players to deciding, you know what, I would indeed like Jayson Tatum on my team even if it’s just for a year. When New England’s ball control offense was insufficient, they built a passing one centered around arguably the greatest tight end of all-time and another tight end that they’d probably like to avoid mentioning but was really, really good.

What do the Cardinals do next? I don’t have the answer, hence why I am posting this for free on the internet instead of in proprietary documents within the organization. But what the greats do is refurbish. The true time to do this was after a series of mid-eighties win teams that were decent but clearly improvable, but this doesn’t mean they are too late–like the axiom about planting a tree, the second-best time to do it is now. But the landscape of the sport has changed and adaptation is a requirement for future success.