Nick Saban is officially stepping away after a combined 28 years as a collegiate coach, the last 17 of which were spent at Alabama. Though the game never passed him by -- he just led Alabama to its 16th straight season with at least 10 wins and its third SEC title in the past four years -- the modern schedule became a bit too much to handle for the 72-year-old Saban.
"I don't think there's any good time, especially when you're a coach," Saban said on ESPN's "SportsCenter". "Because once you're a coach, you think you're going to be a coach forever. But I actually thought that, in hiring coaches, recruiting players, that my age started to become a little bit of an issue. People wanted assurances that I would be here for three years, five years, whatever, and it got harder and harder for me to be honest about.
"And to be honest, this last season was grueling. It was a real grind for us to come from where we started to where we got to. Took a little more out of me than usual. When people mention the health issue, it was really just the grind of, can you do this the way you want to do it? Can you do it the way you've always done it and be able to sustain it and do it for the entire season? If I couldn't make a commitment to do that in the future, the way I think I have to do it, I thought maybe this was the right time based on those two sets of circumstances."
Prior to making the final decision, it was business as usual for Saban. On the day of his retirement, he conducted interviews with prospective assistant coaches and went about with his normal duties. But five minutes before a team meeting scheduled for 4 p.m., he had his moment of clarity.
"The thing that made it more difficult for me is, I felt like it might be the right time for me but how it impacted the players, the coaches, all the people who work here in the building and contributed to the success of the team, how would it affect them," Saban said. "That was the hard part. That was the part I kept vacillating on, back and forth... It was 3:55 p.m. I was sitting in my chair looking at the clock saying, 'You've got five minutes to decide which speech you're going to give.'"
By retiring now, Saban still goes out on top and leaves after one of the most impressive coaching jobs of his career. Alabama lost by 10 points at home against Texas in the second week of the season and then benched quarterback Jalen Milroe ahead of an uninspiring 17-3 win against South Florida in Week 3, which caused the Crimson Tide to drop out of the AP poll top 10 for the first time since 2015. But the season shifted from there. Alabama regained its footing, thanks in large part to a midseason emergence from Milroe -- who had 17 total touchdowns and just two turnovers in the last six games of the year -- and finished the regular season with an unblemished 8-0 showing in SEC play. That earned the Tide a spot in the SEC Championship Game, where they handed top-ranked Georgia its first loss since 2021.
Alabama made it to the College Football Playoff, where it lost to No. 1 Michigan in overtime in the Rose Bowl, marking the first time since Saban took over that Alabama went three straight years without a national title.
"I just have a high standard for how I do things and if I don't feel like I'm living up to that standard, I'm really disappointed," Saban said. "I wasn't disappointed in the season. I wasn't disappointed in the team. I wasn't disappointed in the players. In fact, this team was fun to coach and they came a long ways and I was really proud of the way everybody bought in and did what they did to have the success that we had. But at the same time, I felt like I could have done a better job if I was younger."
