Nick Saban did not have to wait long to find out how Tennessee fans felt about him being in Knoxville, though it was fine initially. During ESPN’s College GameDay on Saturday, the former Alabama coach backed the Volunteers ahead of their matchup with No. 1 Texas, only to turn the crowd against him with the reason behind his dig.

“I’m all in on the University of Tennessee,” Saban said, drawing cheers from the Knoxville crowd before the mood changed. “Because we smoked 16 out of 17 cigars when we played you all.”

The cheers quickly turned into boos before the crowd broke into the “F*** Nick Saban” chant. The verbal attack was loud enough to be heard during the ESPN broadcast, and Saban could only laugh it off, saying, “You can’t take a joke.”

There was not much mystery behind the joke, as Saban spent 17 seasons as Alabama’s head coach and went 16-1 against Tennessee during that time, giving the Volunteers very few chances to enjoy one of college football’s oldest rivalry traditions. 

When Tennessee did finally beat him, it happened in Knoxville in 2022, and it was one of the wildest games in his tenure. That history is exactly what made the GameDay moment work. 

Saban also brought up the cigars that have become part of the rivalry and used his own record against the Volunteers to tease the home crowd before its biggest game of the season.

This week, College GameDay had come to Knoxville for the first regular-season meeting between Texas and Tennessee, with the No. 1 Longhorns visiting a No. 14 Volunteers team that entered the day 3-0. Saban was standing in the middle of a crowd that had spent the morning building excitement for a game that could give Tennessee one of its biggest wins in years.

Now, Saban’s run against Tennessee is wild, straight 15 wins from 2007 to 2021 before the Vols finally got him back in 2022. That one loss came at Neyland Stadium, 52-49. It snapped Tennessee’s 15-game skid against Alabama and gave that home crowd a night they’d been waiting years for.

Back in 2022, ESPN did a story on the Tennessee win and published a fan named Tom Bryan from Nashville’s emotional reaction to the win. 

“I have been holding on to this damn thing for 16 years,” said Bryan. “I bought it in Tuscaloosa in 2007 because I wanted to smoke it down there and smoke one of their own bought down there, just to piss them off. But they whipped our a**, and I have been waiting ever since. I don’t think that humidor thing worked. It’s drier than a bone. But I don’t care, either.”

That game also produced the cigar celebration Saban was referencing. Tennessee fans flooded the field after the win, and cigars became part of the scene as the Volunteers finally got to celebrate a victory over Saban’s Alabama team.

Why the Cigar Joke Hits a Nerve in Knoxville

The cigar tradition has been tied to the Alabama-Tennessee rivalry for decades. The winning side has traditionally celebrated the rivalry victory with cigars, making the smoke almost as recognizable as the final score when the two teams meet.

For Tennessee fans, though, that tradition became heavily associated with Alabama during Saban’s run. Alabama kept winning, and Tennessee kept watching the cigars come out on the other side.

Saban’s line on GameDay reduced all of that history to one sentence. He was effectively telling a Knoxville crowd that Alabama had done most of the celebrating while he was in charge. It was a joke, but it was also based on a record Tennessee fans knew all too well.

The rivalry itself has been played more than 100 times, and Alabama leads the all-time series (60-40-7). The teams met again in 2025, when Alabama won 37-20 in Tuscaloosa, and they are scheduled to renew the rivalry in Knoxville on Oct. 17 this season.

But Saturday was about Texas and Tennessee, not Alabama. The Longhorns arrived as the No. 1 team in the country for their first road game of the season, while the Volunteers were playing their first ranked opponent after opening the year with three straight wins.

That made the crowd’s reaction to Saban more of a sideshow than anything that would affect the game itself. Still, it was a reminder that even after leaving the Alabama sideline, Saban has not lost his connection to the rivalry. 

He can walk into Knoxville as a television analyst, make one joke about cigars and his old record, and immediately get the kind of reaction that once followed him onto the field.

For Tennessee fans, there was at least one way to answer him later in the day. They had the No. 1 team in the country standing in front of them, and a win over Texas would give them something much bigger to celebrate than an argument with Saban on College GameDay.