If you’re lucky, you decide when you retire.
No pink slip. No “we’re downsizing.” No corporate restructure.
The power to call it quits and ride off in the sunset is in your hands.
Perhaps you’ve thought about it for a while. Or more often as your profession changes around you, not necessarily for the better.
You don’t feel like a relic. But there are days when you wonder if anybody around values your opinion. You suspect considerably younger colleagues view you as a doddering old fool who doesn’t know when to put yourself out to pasture.
While you are considered maybe the best in your line of work, the thought of exhaling and enjoying the unknown scares the bejesus out of you.
In a speech at the Alabama Football Coaches Association in January 2022, Alabama head football coach Nick Saban said the following, roughly nine months before his 70th birthday:
“Everybody asks me when I wanna retire . . . retire from what?” Saban rhetorically asked. “I’m gonna jump into an empty abyss, alright, of what am I going to do?”
He’s about to find out. After a 28-year career at four schools which established him as the greatest college head football coach in history, the 72-year-old Saban told his team Wednesday afternoon he was retiring.
As word spread around the nation, particularly in the SEC where Saban won all seven of his national championships, 11 of his 12 league titles and 201 of his 292 victories, the reaction was naturally mixed.
There was rejoicing at schools like Arkansas which was 0-17 vs. Saban, Tennessee and Mississippi State which were each 1-16 vs. Saban including 15 and 16 straight losses, Kentucky/Vanderbilt/Missouri which were a combined 0-14 vs. Saban, Florida which was 1-8 vs. Saban and Georgia, which was 1-9 vs. Saban.
There was also gratitude from coaches resurrected by Saban, such as Lane Kiffin and Steve Sarkisian, whose careers were in the toilet when Saban hired them as offensive coordinators and fast-tracked them back to head coaching jobs at Ole Miss and Texas, respectively.
Saban also mapped the blueprint for how to build championship programs.
It started with what he learned in six years as an NFL assistant, including four years as the defensive coordinator for the Cleveland Browns under head coach Bill Belichick. He applied it to how he organized and operated a college program.
At Alabama, Saban was the first coach to hire player personnel assistants for each of his assistant coaches to aid in scouting, recruiting and film analysis. Almost every SEC school followed suit.
He also was ahead of the game on talent evaluation, assigning minimum height and weight requirements to individual positions.
Each April and May, Saban’s assistants would hand him game film of 10 high school prospects daily. He’d take them home, watch them at night and tell his assistants who to invite to Alabama’s summer camp where he could eyeball the players from head to toe in person.
Saban liked to say, “If we’re picking the right guys, we should be signing four to five (future NFL) first-round draft picks every year.” He’s had 44 first-round picks to date and should have his last two in April’s draft.
As a recruiter, Saban was second to none at closing the deal on his home visits with recruits and parents.
“When he comes to recruit at your house,” Alabama’s 2011 Outland Trophy-winning offensive lineman Barrett Jones once told me, “he brings a notebook outlining specifically how your career will happen under him. And it exactly played out for me that way.”
Saban was also ahead of the curve developing a mental edge for his players. He did this by bringing in some of the most successful athletes in history – Kobe Bryant, Michael Jordan, Ray Lewis, Mike Tyson, Charles Barkley, Alex Rodriguez, Michael Phelps – to speak to his team during preseason practice.
Because Internet video clips and soundbites are designed to get clicks, Saban was saddled with a public persona that he hated the media.
While it’s true some of his press conference explosions were epic and entertaining, he didn’t suffer fools lightly. He respected the media that did their homework and asked intelligent questions. Ask him something with the phrase “What if” and he’d cut you off by saying, “I don’t answer hypothetical questions.”
Some of his rants were calculated. There were times when he came to a press conference with a hidden agenda he wanted to talk about. If a reporter asked a question on that issue or something close to it, Saban was like watching a rocket lift off the launching pad.
He was precise about time management. On one occasion when I set up a phone interview with him, he said, “OK, you’ve got 10 minutes.” I immediately started the stopwatch on my phone.
At the 9-minute, 30-second mark, Saban said to me, “That’s it, I gotta go.” I said, “Nick, I’m timing you. I’ve got 30 seconds and time for one last question.”
He said, “OK.” I asked my question, he answered it and I said, “See Nick, five seconds left. Thanks, see ya.’” He laughed, said “Bye” and hung up.
In the last two or three years, it seems Saban was slightly willing to smell the roses. Perhaps sensing Father Time was gaining on him, he smiled and laughed more often in public.
He allowed himself to enjoy the moment, unlike during the postgame celebration minutes after he guided LSU to a win over Oklahoma to capture the 2003 national championship. Saban’s agent Jimmy Sexton found the Tigers’ coach tucked away in the bowels of the Superdome locker room planning immediate recruiting visits for the next class of prospects.
In 2020, Saban was elected to the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame. When Hall of Fame chairman Doug Ireland and I called Saban to tell him the news, he was genuinely honored and somewhat shocked.
He never imagined he’d be elected in a state where most of its fan base decided to make him a villain for leaving LSU after five seasons ending with 2004. He eventually ended up at Alabama in 2007 after two unsuccessful, miserable years with the Miami Dolphins.
If Saban has any regret in his career, he’ll tell you he wished he’d stayed at LSU at least a bit longer. But getting a chance to become an NFL head coach was an itch he had to scratch.
And for the LSU fans who’ve always trashed Saban in every way possible because he left, please remember he lifted the Tigers’ program out of the gutter and demanded the facilities and an expanded budget required to consistently compete and win national championships.
In short, he changed the culture for the Tigers and that helped Les Miles and Ed Orgeron win national titles in 2007 and 2019.
Saban suggested his induction to the Louisiana Sports Hall of Fame be delayed until he retired. So, the runway is now open and he’s cleared for landing, hopefully with the Class of 2025.
Is he done with coaching, even with a rash of NFL vacancies? Yes, indeed.
But there’s a job out there that needs to be created to restore some order to college football, which has spun completely off its axis with legalized cheating (a.k.a. NIL) and a transfer portal with more freedom than NFL free agency.
When Saban spoke two years ago about not retiring, he also said, “The very challenges that I talk about and the things in our profession that concern me – for you and me both, in your game and our game – that’s what keeps me going. That’s why I get up every day. That’s why I can’t sleep at night sometimes.”
Saban has always been a leading voice about the good and the bad directions college football has taken. He’s truly concerned about the health of the sport that has been his life’s work.
Since the NCAA has no clue how to police the NIL or the transfer portal, the now Power 4 football conferences – the 16-team SEC, the 18-team Big 10 (which should rename itself the Gigantic 18), the 16-team Big 12 (the Bakers’ Dozen Plus Three) and the 17-team ACC – need to break away and form a governing body strictly for football.
It needs a “buck stops here” commissioner.
And that man, now one of the greatest unemployed free agents of all time, is Nicholas Lou Saban Jr.
Contact Ron at ronhigginsmedia@gmail.com