USA TODAY International Edition
Saban’s retirement seems far away
It has been practically a rite of passage at each of Alabama’s recent trips to the national championship football game: How will Nick Saban answer the inevitable question about how long he wants to coach?
“I think I’ve written farewells to Nick Saban for ESPN every single national championship game,” said ESPN and SEC Network personality Paul Finebaum, who has entertained countless conversations on the Crimson Tide’s post- Saban future over the years on his radio show.
But as Alabama tries to win its sixth national title under Saban on Monday against Ohio State, the timing of his eventual departure seems almost irrelevant. At a point in his tenure when logic would suggest he’d be winding down, Saban, 69, appears poised to coach well into his 70s.
Officially, Saban has an answer – albeit a vague one – when he’s asked about how long he wants to keep going. At a news conference before the Southeastern Conference championship game, it was pointed out to him that he’s the same age now as Bear Bryant was when he walked away at the end of the 1982 season. His response was framed around the idea that he wants to coach as long as he feels like he can maintain the high standard he’s established for the last 14 seasons.
“I love doing what I do, and want to continue to do it for as long as I feel like I can contribute in a positive way to the program,” Saban said. “That’s about the only plan I have for the future.”
In other words, if you’re a fan of another school or rival coach who spent the last decade rooting for a natural erosion of dominance or that Saban’s age would eventually catch up to him or that he’d simply get bored and look for a new challenge, you might want to buckle up.
It looks like you’re going to have to deal with him for the foreseeable future.
“He’s recruiting as well today as he has throughout his tenure, and without any serious medical condition, you have to ask the question – why would he walk away?” Finebaum said.
“If you’re a Hollywood script writer you would have thought there’s no better time than three years ago when he had the most dramatic championship game ending ever and he comes back and by Saban’s standards struggles for two years. Last year it looked like the window might be closing and now here he is again. I was more convinced he was close to the end three years ago than now.”
Part of this, of course, is intentional and strategic on Saban’s part to combat a narrative in recruiting that he won’t be around for the elite- level high school juniors and seniors Alabama is competing with Georgia, Ohio State, Clemson, LSU, Texas A& M and others to sign.
In 2018, Alabama lost more of those battles than usual and slipped to fifth in the 247Sports rankings. There was talk within the industry that schools were effectively using his age against him, and Saban seemed to notice. He responded by overhauling his coaching staff to become younger and more recruiting-focused, getting the top ranking back in 2019, finishing second behind Georgia in 2020 and signing arguably his most impressive class last month with seven five- star prospects and 15 four- stars.
The pipeline of talent isn’t slowing. If anything, because of his willingness to change at the first sign of weakness, Saban has made Alabama look even more indestructible.
As Finebaum alluded to, the 2017 championship when Alabama came from behind to beat Georgia in overtime would have been a natural moment for Saban to ride off into the sunset. By that point it was clear that college football had fully transitioned from an era when you could win a championship with a great defense and a pedestrian offense to a style of football that required explosiveness and tempo and ability to stretch the field vertically.
Five years earlier, Saban had lodged his infamous complaint about no- huddle offenses: “Is this what we want football to be?” But instead of walking away or letting the game pass him by, Saban embraced an overhaul at Alabama and built the best offense in the sport.
It’s almost as if the challenge of that, of completely flipping his program’s identity from dominant defense to unstoppable offense, only gave him another mountain to conquer.
“I think the advent of the spread, ( run- pass option plays), blocking downfield when passes are caught behind the line of scrimmage, all those things have dramatically changed the style of play offensively, and that affects every part of the game,” Saban said Thursday.
“You have to defend how you pick players to play certain positions because the game is so much more a perimeter game now than it used to be, and what your scheme is to defend those kinds of changes has been pretty dramatic, as well.
“I think it’s a great game for fans. Obviously score a lot more points with this style of play than we used to do, we used to in the past, and I think that always makes it exciting.”
Finebaum theorizes that in a strange way, COVID- 19 might have worked to extend Saban’s career. Right when schools started sending players home in March, Alabama was on the cutting edge by sending players Apple watches to monitor data from their workouts. It’s also one of the few major programs that didn’t have a significant disruption – aside from Saban getting a false positive before the LSU game and then contracting COVID- 19 before the Iron Bowl game against Auburn.
“Whatever edge he could find, he found, and he gained a lot of ground in that first few weeks in terms of not letting anything affect him,” Finebaum said.
“Even getting COVID doesn’t seem to have affected him. I hear from people in Tuscaloosa that the two times he went home convinced him he wasn’t ready to leave the game.”
In other words, trying to predict when Alabama’s run at the top will be over is a fool’s errand. It won’t go on forever, but as Saban closes in on a possible sixth title at the school, the end no longer seems in sight.