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Chris Low, ESPN Senior Writer
On the first day of his retirement in the wake of a legendary coaching career, Nick Saban was still thinking team first.
He wasn’t playing golf, planning a vacation or even sleeping in for an extra hour. Like every other morning for the last 17 years as Alabama‘s head football coach, he was driving to the office — always there by 7:20 a.m. sharp at the latest.
“I want to be there for the players, for the coaches, anything I can do to support them during this transition,” Saban told ESPN in his first public comments since retiring on Wednesday, a move that reverberated throughout the sports world and shocked even those that were closest to him within the Alabama program.
“There are a lot of things to clean up, to help as we move forward. I’m still going to have a presence here at the university in some form and trying to figure out all that and how it works. This is a place that will never be too far away from Miss Terry’s and my hearts.”
Saban informed his staff and players that he was retiring during a 4 p.m. meeting in the team room Wednesday. It wasn’t a long meeting, less than 10 minutes, and Saban said it was important to him that they hear the news first from him.
“I wanted them to know how much they meant to me,” said Saban, who won six national championships at Alabama and another one at LSU. “It was hard, all of it was. The last few days have been hard. But look, it’s kind of like I told the players. I was going to go in there and ask them to get 100% committed to coming back and trying to win a championship, but I’ve always said that I didn’t want to ride the program down, and I felt whether it was recruiting or hiring coaches, now that we have people leaving, the same old issue always sort of came up — how long are you going to do this for?”
Jeff Allen, Alabama’s head athletic trainer, has been with Saban all 17 years. He’s the last football staff member remaining that Saban hired from the outside when Saban took the job at Alabama in 2007. Allen was emotional Thursday even talking about Saban’s retirement.
“This is one of those days you knew was going to come, but when it does, you’re still somewhat in shock that it finally has come,” Allen said. “I don’t want to say it was a grieving process, because he’s still here, but what’s helped us process it all is how he’s managed it. He’s in the office today and wants to still be a part of this place. It was special for me this morning when I was with him, just hearing him talk about how important it was for him for Alabama to continue to be successful. That means the world to all of us who are here and love this place and want to see what he’s built continue to grow.”
Saban, 72, said his age made it increasingly more difficult for him to do the job the way he demanded of himself that it should be done. He told ESPN last month that 14-hour days were a lot harder to navigate at 72 than they were at 62 and reiterated that Thursday.
“Last season was difficult for me from just a health standpoint, not necessarily having anything major wrong, but just being able to sustain and do things the way I want to do them, the way I’ve always done them,” Saban said. “It just got a little bit harder. So you have to decide, ‘OK, this is sort of inevitable when you get to my age.'”
Saban added that it would have been unfair to everybody to keep saying that he was going to be at Alabama for four or five more years.
“Which I would have been happy to try to do, but I just didn’t feel like I could do that and didn’t want to get into a year-to-year deal that doesn’t help anybody and doesn’t help you continue to build and be at the standard that I want to be at and want this program to be at,” Saban said.
At no time did Saban consider scaling back his responsibilities or transitioning into more of a CEO role as a head coach. He’s renowned for being hands-on in everything that touches his program. He said he finalized his decision to retire after returning from a trip to his home in Florida with wife Terry last weekend. Saban was still interviewing potential assistant coaches via Zoom on Tuesday and Wednesday. In fact, he was talking with a potential receivers coach about an hour before telling the team that he was retiring.
“It’s the way I’ve always done things,” Saban said. “You keep working right up until it’s time to walk away. I think when you get away from doing what you’ve always done, you’re never going to be as effective. And that’s just sort of it. I knew it was time.”
Saban has expressed his disdain over the last few years for the lack of uniformity in college football, especially regarding NIL being used as a guise for pay-for-play and the transfer portal and all the tampering that has occurred with players moving from school to school.
Saban was insistent, though, that the changing landscape in college football was not the reason he was leaving.
“Don’t make it about that. It’s not about that,” Saban said. “To me, if you choose to coach, you don’t need to be complaining about all that stuff. You need to adjust to it and adapt to it and do the best you can under the circumstances and not complain about it. Now, I think everybody is frustrated about it. We had an SEC conference call, 14 coaches on there [Wednesday], and there’s not one guy you can talk to who really understands what’s happening in college football and thinks that it’s not an issue.
“But this [his retirement] ain’t about that. We’ve been in this era for three years now, and we’ve adapted to it and won in this era, too. It’s just that I’ve always known when it would be time to turn it over to somebody else, and this is that time.”
Saban, who loves playing golf, has made it a point to never play during the season except for maybe during the open week. He made his first hole-in-one during the open date before the LSU game in 2016. Now that he’s retired, Saban pushed back on the notion that he’d be able to get his handicap down under 5.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, but we’ll be able to play more than we used to,” he said with a laugh.
Over the years, Saban has joked “What the hell else am I going to do?” any time he was asked about retiring from coaching. His late father was a Pop Warner coach in their Monongah, West Virginia, community, and Saban broke into the coaching ranks in 1973 as a graduate assistant at Kent State under Don James.
But now that he is retiring after 30 years as a head coach in the college and NFL ranks, Saban said, “There’s a lot I can do and a lot I want to do,” adding that it was important to him that he still had the quality of life remaining to do all of those things after he quit coaching.
“There’s life after football, but I’m always going to be here for Alabama however they need me,” Saban said.
Allen met privately with Saban Thursday morning and said his longtime boss paused briefly before telling Allen how much he had meant to him.
“But he’s been doing that all morning with everybody, literally walking around and thanking people,” Allen said. “One of our custodians came up to me and said how much she was going to miss him and miss cleaning his office and how well he had treated her. People don’t always see that side of him. “But all this being said, we also know what he wants us to do is to move on in the right way and help the new coach to continue to be successful, and that’s the way we can best honor coach Saban.”