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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…
Source link : https://www.cbssports.com/college-football/news/nick-saban-cites-age-mental-grind-for-retirement-from-alabama-amid-college-footballs-shifting-landscape/
Author : Will Backus
Publish date : 2024-01-12 01:59:42
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