It’s now the third season since seven-time national champion Nick Saban retired following a 50-year career in coaching football. But does he have any desire to return to the sidelines in the years to come?
The answer is a pretty resounding no. In a recent appearance on ESPN’s Get Up, Saban said that he’s all done with coaching football and enjoys getting to spend time with his family after years upon years of focusing on football.
“I think that it was just time for me, 72 years old,” Saban said. “I think it was time to have some quality of life with family with Miss Terry, and enjoy some things we’ve never been able to do.
“Coaching is not a job, it’s a way of life. So, how about let’s do something else and have some fun doing something else, and not live under this stress level that we’ve lived under for 50 years.”
Not the NIL
For years fans have argued that Saban chose to leave Alabama because he was tired of having to deal with the advent of name, image and likeness (NIL) making it harder for him to recruit the top players in football. But he denied that, pointing out that he had previously dealt with paying players in the NFL and over his final few years at Alabama.
“Well, that’s not why I got out of coaching,” Saban said. “We had three years of this, you know, my last three years. I coached in the NFL, so I was used to managing the salary cap and that type of thing.”
One could make the argument that due to Saban’s struggles in both the NFL and over his final three years for the Tide that it doesn’t help his case.
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But that doesn’t change the fact that Saban is not interested in returning to coaching. He believes that his age alone makes it harder for him to recruit the right people.
“The one thing I didn’t want to do is ride the program down. And once you get a certain age, people start using that against you in recruiting and your ability to attract the kind of players that you want to attract,” he said.
“I wanted the University of Alabama to continue to be successful,” Saban said of his 2023 retirement decision. “ I didn’t want my presence to have anything to do with that and their ability to be successful in the future.”
