OT: Saban on his decision to retire
An ESPN article just came out with some details on Saban’s decision to retire. I’m not sure if any of this is really “news”, but I thought there were some pretty interesting details that I hadn’t read before.
It's a fairly long article, but here are some (long) highlights:
Saban told the ‘Bama AD (Byrne) that he was nearing the end of his coaching career after the 2022 season, and Byrne immediately began vetting coaches as Saban’s replacement.
After the 2022 season, Saban informed Byrne he was nearing the end of his Hall of Fame coaching career…
While hopeful Saban would keep coaching, Byrne knew deep down that the 72-year-old legend was giving him notice, so he quickly went to work. Byrne had his staff research the college head-coaching hires over the past 25 years from the winningest 25 programs during that span.
"Part of what I was trying to understand is what were the analytics, and our studies showed that 75% of the time you're basically hiring a Group of 5 head coach, Power 5 coordinator or NFL coordinator," Byrne said. "That's not necessarily a negative, but when it comes to the theory that you're going to hire just whoever you want, the percentages don't support that."
Saban still could’ve held out for a couple of years, but it looks like two factors pushed him to make his decision when he did.
1. The changes in player mentality
But Alabama's 27-20 overtime loss to Michigan in the CFP semifinal at the Rose Bowl on Jan. 1 was a hard one for Saban to digest. Not only was Saban upset about the way his team played, he was especially disheartened about some of the things that happened afterward -- in the Rose Bowl locker room and back on campus, when he met with some of the players.
"I want to be clear that wasn't the reason, but some of those events certainly contributed," Saban said of his decision to retire. "I was really disappointed in the way that the players acted after the game. You gotta win with class. You gotta lose with class. We had our opportunities to win the game and we didn't do it, and then showing your ass and being frustrated and throwing helmets and doing that stuff ... that's not who we are and what we've promoted in our program."
Once back in Tuscaloosa, as Saban began meeting with players, it became even more apparent to him that his message wasn't resonating like it once did.
"I thought we could have a hell of a team next year, and then maybe 70 or 80 percent of the players you talk to, all they want to know is two things: What assurances do I have that I'm going to play because they're thinking about transferring, and how much are you going to pay me?" Saban recounted. "Our program here was always built on how much value can we create for your future and your personal development, academic success in graduating and developing an NFL career on the field.
"So I'm saying to myself, 'Maybe this doesn't work anymore, that the goals and aspirations are just different and that it's all about how much money can I make as a college player?' I'm not saying that's bad. I'm not saying it's wrong, I'm just saying that's never been what we were all about, and it's not why we had success through the years."
2. The assistant coach carousel
Saban had also grown weary of churning through assistant coaches every year. For example, Tommy Rees, who was hired during the 2023 offseason, was Saban's seventh offensive coordinator in the past 11 years, and on occasion, there were nearly entire overhauls. After the 2018 season, seven assistants left for other jobs. Saban could tell that his age was becoming a factor in hiring coaches.
"People wanted assurances that I was going to be here for three or four years, and it became harder to make those assurances," Saban said. "But the thing I loved about coaching the most was the relationships that you had with players, and those things didn't seem to have the same meaning as they once did."
Saban probably deserves to be in conversation as the GOAT. I'm glad that Michigan could send him off to retirement with an L.
Did I miss the Alabama players dropping a post-game full moon? I don't recall Alabama being particularly classless in defeat, although I shed no tears for Nick Saban. :)
I thought that they showed tremendous class by one: not taping Seth McLaughlin to the goal post and leaving him there.
I still can't believe how openly hostile Saban and Milroe were towards that guy during the game. They reminded me of Aaron Rodgers.
They did worse, they shipped him off to Columbus Ohio
I thought he was referring to our players at first. We did go to their sideline and rub it in a bunch.
Plus that Roman Wilson TikTok video lampooning the "don't give a piss" guy. I assume Saban consumes all the memes.
I thought they behaved pretty well. Here's a video of that follows Milroe from the end of the last play to the tunnel and all in all, Bama players looks like they're handling it fine. I'm not sure if he didn't notice #65 being injured but not checking on your guy wasn't a great look.
Honestly, if anything, I thought the Michigan players were being a little provocative by rushing all the way over to the Bama sideline (led by.. of all people.. Keon Sabb) and kinda taunting them (you can't see that in the video below but the broadcast feed shows it pretty well).
Yeah, Keon Sabb and Will Johnson both went over near their sideline (but when Johnson shows up in this clip, it's just a quick congratulations).
I didn't see anything that I can honestly say would have bothered me if, say, a TCU player had done it the year before, though.
I see nothing remotely problematic from any player on either team.
Looked like normal after game shaking of hands, nothing taunting at all
I agree our players should have stayed farther from the Bama sideline, but when you win the freakin Rose bowl on a walk-off 4th-and-Goal stop in OT, people are gonna rush the field. I'm a big critic of all the field rushes and court rushes that seem to be happening more frequently. But THAT Rose Bowl game was one of the special ones that really warranted that behavior IMO.
Rushing the field was necessary. Sabb really pushed the envelope though-- go back and watch the ending (it's fun! I do it almost daily). After I saw it on rewatch I was very relieved he didn't trigger a scuffle that would have detracted from the moment.
He specifically said in the locker room and back on campus so this video is irrelevant as it only shows on field.
I don't see any reason Saban would lie here. Roster full of cocky 5 star rich kids losing to Michigan after all the coverage leading up to the game was that Michigan was scared? That could cause some emotional outbursts.
Don’t forget how scared Michigan’s reaction was to the pairing / matchup announcement.
Pretty sure it’s just a figure of speech and isn’t meant to be taken literally
I assumed as much, but it's not one I'm particularly familiar with. I guess I'm not hip to the way the kids talk like, uh, Nick Saban. :)
It absolutely is a figure of speech. Nobody literally showed their ass. Having grown up in the south, I've always heard this as someone making fools of themselves. I believe it's a very southern idiom.
I agree, I live in the south and its something you hear all the time. I also took it that it may have been the players attitudes or actions in the locker room after the game. I could be wrong, but I doubt it.
I had the same question. I remember Milroe looking particularly angry and maybe throwing his helmet at the end. It seemed appropriate enough for the situation, not terrible.
The quote makes it sound like it has to do with other things in the locker room we didn’t see, which is crazy for him to air out.
You wont convince me he's not retiring because of other teams catching up/paying the same with NIL.
He kind of infers it.
He liked it when they got their under the table money, and had to act grateful to him for it. But now that it's an open market, and they can discuss payments openly, he's acting as if they're selfish and all about the money.
He puts a nostalgic twist on it, but reading between the lines, he wants players under his thumb.
In KS, we call this talk, "The Bill Self".
It makes what Harbaugh did even more amazing. It will be hard or impossible for someone to repeat that without significant NIL upfront.
There are what 8 billion people on this planet and I seriously wonder if Harbaugh is the only person who could've pulled off what he did at Michigan. We don't illegally pay players which should cripple us vs big time programs like Ohio State and Bama and yet we go 40-3 and win a national title anyways. Harbaugh truly might be a unicorn.
Well, I don't know. I remember Seth suggesting in a podcast last summer that there was a long history of Michigan finding ways to funnel financial compensation to the star players here, including (he mentioned) Tom Harmon. I think we need to be a little careful about sanctimony here — in insisting that: a) we don't now, never have, and never would pay players under the table; and b) every other successful school does.
The irony is fairly rich, in fact, with so many other schools and fans from around the country happy to point out that we did, in fact, get caught "cheating" (in another way) this year. I know how everybody here feels about how little that "cheating" (notice quotes) actually contributed to our wins, and whether or not we actually deserved to get punished, but ... it does amuse me how often we insist, with high moral outrage, that we — Michigan — would never cheat.
It may be true. But I admit to having less confidence in my knowledge about what actually goes on behind closed doors both at Michigan and at other programs than many people here do. I have no idea.
Has a player for Michigan football ever been illegally compensated? I would bet serious money the answer to that question is yes. Just sheer numbers of people we're talking about over the years. Probability alone makes it a lock it's happened before.
But institutionally we don't do that. That much is obvious. We just went 40-3 over the last 3 years, 3 Big Ten championships, a national championship and we recruit like we're a perennial 8-4 team. Why is that? Cuz we don't illegally pay players. That's the key to getting top 5, top 3, #1 classes. So our relatively weak recruiting classes alone given our historical success is strong circumstantial evidence we don't illegally pay recruits.
And btw I'm not happy about this. No sanctimony here. I want us to illegally pay. I want the top classes. I think the idea that it's "illegal" is a joke. We're talking about rules here created by greedy psychopaths.
So what Harbaugh accomplished when you consider the above...well it literally may be the greatest accomplishment in college football history.
But I would only counter with this: part of what allowed us to keep that group of players together for that three year run is that they weren't guys out there chasing the top dollar. Michigan won because they scouted and developed guys, and they built a culture of guys who play for each other, not for the dollars. We lost ONE impact player to the portal after a coaching change and staff overhaul. How many did Bama lose?
If you recruit in a way in which you're paying the top guys, you have to wonder what their true motivations are and if you'll ever keep them around for three years to the point where they become those dominant top-3-in-the-draft guys. They're always going to be looking to where the price of the brick is the highest.
EXACTLY! The entire time I'm reading it, I'm thinking "blah, blah, blah, NIL, blah, blah, blah, NIL. Every other team can now get players paid (legally) just like his team has done for the past 15 years (illegally).
I've been saying this for three years now. It really became obvious after Satan called out Jimbo and Jimbo bitch slapped him back to reality that the "tide" had turned against the Alabama way of paying players. Satan knew, the playing field had been leveled for the first time in his SEC career and he wanted to preserve his legacy especially because he's 72.
It’s not that other teams are catching up with NIL. Plenty of other teams had illegal bag in the past. He could live with that because it was a one time conversation with the recruit in the recruits house. You either won that players services for 3-4 years or not and you moved on.
Now, it’s an every year conversation with the same players in the coaches office. That is what he can not handle.
I don’t blame him. I doubt very many of the great coaches from the past would want to work in this current environment except for the ridiculous salaries.
Could you imagine the Lloyd Carr/Woodson story about transferring in today’s environment?
“Yes, hello Mrs Woodson, could you please tell your son he’s not transferring?”
”How much more is he going to get paid this year?”
“Uhhhhhhhh….let me get back to you.”
This is the correct take. The Meta game is about to swing into overdrive and is going to get insanely complex and eviscerate stability within programs. Namely his. He had his run and after talking to the players could hear the opportunities for winning in the future fizzling out like a bad fart.
If you dont need the money, who sticks around for that shit?
One should never stick around for a bad fart...never
When he started talking about how the players were acting in the locker room after the Rose Bowl, I was expecting his to say that players were smiling and chatting on their phones or something. From an outsider's perspective, I wouldn't be too upset about people throwing helmets in frustration after losing a playoff semifinal game in that fashion.
But yeah, the "what are you going to do for me" attitudes in the player meetings must have been very disheartening.
Anyone get the sense that he was always signing the "what are you going to do for me" players BUT the problem is now there is competition? Before his response was "Where else you gonna go?" now the players have leverage. Honestly he can piss off with his theatrics. Im not going to be duped by him. That guy did everything he could to stop Harbaugh from having camps in the SEC footprint. He doesnt give fuck all about fair and balanced. 15 years of the number one class but now its all just too much? Come on MGBLOG (looking at our leaders here) what happened to your long term memory?
Plus doesn't the guy make like 11 million a year? And has also left multiple places in search of better opportunities. He is just mad now that other schools and players themselves have a piece of the pie.
While that's all true, at least Saban did so under contracts which restricted him from seeking greener pastures every single year. The all-free-agency CFB environment right now is emphatically not that.
C'mon, man. Hus situation and that of CFB players if apples and oranges.
The restrictions that might've kept Saban from seeking greener pastures don't mean much to deep-pocketed alums/Athletic Departments of football crazy universities. They would've happily paid the buyout if Saban was serious about leaving. It's just that Alabama was also willing to renegotiate Saban's contract at the drop of a hat to give him more pay and more power if Saban demanded it.
Exactly and to me this is a bit like a plantation owner/slave owner mentality.
The head coach can make $10m a year and chase higher paying jobs all day long, same with assistants or support staff, it’s fine for everyone else but when the slaves start doing it he’s not okay with it.
This is where Harbaugh stood on his own in CFB, I haven’t heard of another coach advocating for players like he did. He’s been consistent in his message while others are seeing the light only because they’ve been forced.
This was basically the case made in an Atlantic article back in 2011. I haven't read it since it came out, but I think I'll go back and look at it through the lenses of today's situation.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/10/the-shame-of-college-sports/308643/
No. No, it’s not. Not in anyway shape or form. People who make slave plantations(different kinds of plantations like the Plantation of Ireland which didn’t have enslaved people) analogies in regards to football do so because they are one of three things: stupid, maliciously ignorant, or a combination of the two.
Players can leave at any time. There is no literal or even figurative bonds holding them into place. College football is and always has been a voluntary activity just as any job is in the US since the end of slavery.
To make such patently false and insulting analogies is to spit upon the graves of people who were actual slaves. They had no choice. They could not quit. If they fled they were hunted down by slave hunters and packs of dogs. They were then whipped, if not killed. They were fed poorly, housed in appalling conditions, the women raped, families broken up, subject to being sold at anytime, and were regularly whipped for the most minor of transgressions. They were psychologically and physically terrorized from birth.
To compare well-fed, housed, and adored athletes to that is criminally offensive.
Saban was infamous for over-signing classes and kicking kids to the curb when they didn't rise to the top. He's a sanctimonious prick.
I remember the term "Grey Shirt" where he brought too many kids on, and kids had to sit for the fall and hope they made it in the spring, but couldn't go anywhere else.
He oversigned, and booted kids that weren't performing and Alabama paid to get those top classes.
He still is a hell of a coach to do what he did, but it is clear that his frustration lies in the fact that players have some power back and other programs can even the playing field with NIL.
...and Alabama paid to get those top classes.
That is my assumption, but it is funny that one of his big reasons for leaving is that kids only care about playing time and how much they're going to get paid. Those are odd reasons if Alabama had been paying people for years. Either he didn't pay anyone, or it is annoying him that there is legal competition for his players and he can't stash them on the bench after the initial check clears.
Very funny to me to hear the AD try to sound smart about “analytics” when they just ended up making the most obvious hire since OSU got Urban
In any case, I’m not quite as cynical about Saban as some (though I do understand why many are rolling their eyes at this). I do think it’s much harder to manage college kids who always have short term goals ahead of long term ones
Yeah. I wonder what the analytics said about deboer a year into his research or even 3 months before they hired him
Somewhat similar to an AD around here congratulating himself for patience.
college kids who always have short term goals ahead of long term ones
I think this is at the heart of the matter (and it's been the problem with shareholder capitalism in the U.S. for decades). I think Saban (and other coaches) are sincere in their concerns and do have a point. Yes, Saban benefited more than most from the old system (including bag men he may have/not known about), but at least he was able to get kids to trust their coaches and programs and buy in to their long-term development plans that they were going to be so much better off in the long-term with many positive results.
Saban is not the only coach bemoaning this, and it's not only or mostly about the lack of control or power coaches have over student-athletes in this brave new world. (Yeah, Harbaugh wants that SB ring, and the NCAA investigations play their part, but the changing landscape of recruiting and retention and development surely also played a part in his decision to leave for the NFL).
I believe many, if not most, college coaches really do care about the long-term development of the person as well as the player (but unlike most teaching jobs, poor results by your students will get you fired), and both the process and benefits take time to develop, most especially in a difficult sport like football (or education as well). One of the greatest problems coaches face is to teach patience to kids and a culture which demand instant gratification.
I think the Analytics said… Lanning. But, Lanning replied.. “no thanks”.
Nothing against DeBoer - he’s solid, IMO - he just wasn’t Bama’s first choice.
"... and how much are you going to pay me?"
I have some sympathies for Saban and other coaches dealing with this mentality. I predicted ( as did many others) when NIL was originally authorized that it was inevitably going to lead to turmoil in locker rooms, and it's done exactly that.
However, coaches like Saban are also responsible for this mess, because of the grotesquely bloated salaries that they've demanded over the past two decades. Defenders of this greed say they deserve it because that's what the market will pay, and the obvious response is if that's the metric, then the players deserve to extract everything they can as well.
You can't justify huge salaries to coaches and ADs and AD staff while denying the players some of the spoils.
Well put Don. When someone is choking out all of college football for 15 years are we going to have sympathy when someone puts a foot on his neck? Nah you reap what you sow Saban.
However, coaches like Saban are also responsible for this mess, because of the grotesquely bloated salaries that they've demanded over the past two decades.
I don't know if it's fair to blame the coaches themselves for the infusion of money into the college game over the past twenty years or so. This is the work of the conferences and the tv networks bidding the contracts up, and to a lesser extent their agents that negotiate the contracts and the consumers that continue to pay for the ever-growing cost of cable/streaming tv services. It's unfortunate that greed on the part of the conferences and tv networks is ruining the very essence of the college game, and I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually kills everything that is good about it, if that hasn't already happened.