re: Could Saban win a national championship at South Carolina?

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Maybe but the Bama job is the perfect storm for Saban. Big stadium, they had just spent $100m on facilities, created an excellent achademic center, big time fan base that put 90k in the stands on Spring Game, and long time tradition that creates a base to build on.

Not sure USC has all that but I guess could get there.

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USC has all of this except tradition.

I was having this exact same conversation with a UTK fan friend of mine.

IMO, Spurrier has done more here than Saban would have if both had started in 2005. Spurrier likes to build programs from relative scratch, while everything was in place at Alabama for Saban to win immediately. Spurrier had to have an AD willing to invest in facilities and infrastructure, and some of those investments are starting to pay dividends.

We've always had the fan support, but most of our fans didn't really know how far behind the rest of the conference we lagged when it came to extras such as weight rooms, video boards, stadium experience, academic centers, etc. In the last 10 years, USC's campus looks radically different from how it did Holtz's last season here.

Now that Spurrier has built USC into a consistent top-10 threat, a guy like Saban could finish the drill. But he would not have been able, I don't think, to build here the foundation that Spurrier and Hyman did. USC is now an attractive job for the next coach (who I still believe is currently on staff). We couldn't say that after Holtz, and certainly not after Brad Scott.