Nick Saban hilariously details why he struggles to watch non-Alabama games

It’s well known how much work Nick Saban puts into game plans. The trade-off with that, though, is it impacts how he watches non-Alabama college football games.

That’s why he said he tries to avoid doing so.

“I’m like, ‘What can we watch on Netflix?'” Saban joked on his radio show Thursday night.

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Normally, Saban watches other teams and scouting for future Alabama games. That means he’s looking for holes in the defense, areas to exploit on offense and making notes on how to adjust his scheme.

When he tries to watch as a fan, he can’t break that habit.

“I really have a hard time enjoying the game, to be honest with you, when I watch it,” Saban said. “Because … all the time that I spend, whether it’s watching a defensive team for our offensive preparation or the other team’s offense for the defense’s preparation. What you’re constantly looking for is what are the issues, what causes problems, what kind of adjustments do you have to make if we were playing against that? That’s all I do.

“I’ve got, like, 200 pages of formations that I go through on Sunday that are matched up with the film and I write comments on every page about what kind of adjustments do we want to play? … When I watch a game on TV, I’m watching and I’m saying, ‘How would we play that play? What would we do if they were in that formation and did that?’ I might as well go back to work. It’s not really enjoyable, and then I find myself like at the end of the game saying, ‘Why didn’t they call timeout?’ I’m like managing a game like we’re playing the game.”

Nick Saban shares how he changed his tune on CFP expansion

Earlier in the show, Saban explained why he’s in favor of expanding the College Football Playoff to 12 teams. He said he wasn’t initially a fan of going from the two-team national championship to a four-team playoff, but he changed his tune recently.

The reason? Fans will enjoy an expanded CFP more.

“The last few years, I am actually an advocate of having a bigger playoff because if you have a bigger playoff, you have more fan interest because the only fan interest now is in the playoffs, aight?” Saban said. “You have a four-team playoff, so you’ve got seven or eight teams that still have a chance to get in the playoffs, so their fan bases are still excited about what’s going on and everybody else is a little disappointed. If you have a 12-team playoff, you’d probably have 20-25 teams that would still have a chance to get into the 12-team playoff. We would have a chance to get in a 12-team playoff even though we’ve had a couple disappointing losses.

“And I think there would be a lot more fan interest on a national basis for a lot more teams. I’m actually for that. Now, that will completely diminish bowl games and, hopefully, some kind of way, we can make the bowl games a part of this playoff system so that we don’t diminish some of the bowl games and the traditions that go with those bowl games.”