This story appears in ESPN The Magazine's Aug. 20 College Football 2018 Issue. Subscribe today!

Five conference championships, five national titles, an average of 12.5 wins per season: Nick Saban's past decade at Alabama lives among sports' all-time great dynasties. It also begs imitation. Piece by piece, fallen rival by fallen rival, the tendrils of Saban's "process" span college football, his blueprint reshaping an entire sport.

Building a better Bama

Nick Saban's imprint is most apparent in the conference he has dominated. It's not just that everyone in the SEC is chasing Alabama. In many cases, teams are trying to re-create the Tide.

Four of Saban's former assistants are now SEC head coaches (Jimbo Fisher, Kirby Smart, Will Muschamp and Jeremy Pruitt), and nine of the conference's 13 programs have coaches whoonce worked for him. One of the programs that doesn't, Arkansas, hired a former Saban player-personnel staffer this offseason as one of its two recruiting coordinators.

As his apprentices hop on the SEC coaching carousel because of Bama's success, Saban's rivals have in turn lost their rides. When Mark Richt was shoved out the door at Georgia in 2015 after 15 seasons and a 145 -- 51 record, Saban told reporters, "I don't know what the world's coming to in our profession." But truth be told, Saban is precisely what has turned his profession upside down.

A Tide, turned Average tenure of Power 5 coaches in the 11 years before Saban was hired at Alabama: 6.27 seasons Average tenure of Power 5 coaches in the 11 years since: 3.75 seasons

Like