We Asked AI To Predict Alabama’s Next Head Football Coach Since Nobody Knows Anything

The University of Alabama‘s search for a new Head Coach is currently underway after Nick Saban announced his retirement, a move which came as a shock to many.

Overnight, the entire College Football World was convinced that Oregon Ducks head coach Dan Lanning was going to be the man for the job. It was such a ‘lock’ that sportsbooks even took odds off the board. Then Dan Lanning came out Thursday morning and announced he was sticking with the Ducks and everyone went back to the dartboard throwing guesses at the wall.

Since nobody seems to know anything, or if they do they’re not saying anything publicly, we did the only reasonable thing and asked the Internet’s latest and greatest artificial intelligence models to predict who the next University of Alabama Football Head Coach will be. I went to Google Bard for those answers. Then I went to Imagine with Meta AI where I asked Meta’s AI to predict what the next Bama HC will look like. Here are the results, with Google Bard’s results first. I had it run the prompt twice:

We can scratch Dan Lanning from that list. So it remains to be seen if Google Bard will be accurate on its next choice. Former Washington HC Chris Petersen would actually be a great candidate for the role, and current Huskies HC Kalen DeBoer has emerged as a top name for the position.

AI Predicts What The Next Alabama Head Coach Will Look Like

For the second part, I went to Imagine with Meta AI and asked it to predict what the next Head Coach of the Crimson Tide will look like. I found it fascinating that none of the renderings bear any resemblance to Nick Saban.

There are shades of Nick Saban here. More weathered to be sure, and more built. But this might be the only instance where AI pulled some looks from Nick Saban for this thought experiment:

Any guesses?

You look pretty, pretty familiar…

Is that Urban Meyer I’m looking at here?

The youngest candidate in the search:

I did ask ChatGPT but it’s useless with real-time news. The response started “As of my last knowledge update in January 2022, I don’t have information on the current status of the University of Alabama’s football coaching situation or any recent developments.” From there, it wouldn’t even take a guess.

Alabama’s AD Greg Byrne is reportedly looking to make a hire within 72 hours. Bama will work fast on this. So we’ll soon find out how accurate the latest and greatest AI is at predicting Bama’s next head coach.