Nick Saban reveals when he's most nervous during a game week

Nick Saban is arguably the greatest college football coach of all time. Still, he’s not immune to the nerves that coaching brings on prior to a game.

Earlier this week on Hey Coach and The Nick Saban Show, Saban revealed when he gets the most nervous during a game week.

“I think the hardest time for me is actually right before the game,” said Saban. “As soon as we go out for pregame warm-up and everybody starts running around, I’m fine. When I get on the sidelines, I get the headset on — I’m fine. But when I’m sitting in the locker room for an hour, getting dressed, I usually write some notes .. I have this little card that I do, a pre-game checklist .. I’m really kind of shaking my leg the whole time.

“That’s when I’m most nervous. But once we go out, once we start pregame, once we get into it — I’m not nervous at all.”

Afterwards, Saban confirmed that there’s a simple reason why the nerves creep in — there’s nothing more he could do. He’s prepared all he could, now it’s just time to play football.

Nick Saban controls what he can control. His teams are arguably the most prepared in the entire nation. But when the only thing standing between his team and victory is playing the game, even the one of the greats feels a little queasy.

Saban: ‘I think everybody has fear of failure.’

Furtermore, Nick Saban revealed his biggest motivating factor as head coach. Saban’s answer was simple: Losing. And he has a great reason why he chose it.

“I think everybody has fear of failure,” Saban said. “Anybody that’s in this room. Everyone took a test when you were in school and you weren’t anxious and nervous and fearful about what the result was going to be, stand up if you’ve never experienced that. How many people you see standing up? Zero. Now, if you really, really prepared well … that anxiety wasn’t as great, right? Because you had confidence because you prepared the right way. So I think we all have a little bit of fear of failure, and that’s a motivating factor for us.

“Everybody wants to win, and what I’ve always tried to do, which keeps me away from fear of failure and it also keeps me away from thinking about winning, is staying focused on not the outcome, but what you have to do to get the outcome. That’s always been what I try to do. If you do that as a player and you do it as a competitor, you don’t have the anxiety because you’re not thinking about the outcome. You’re thinking about what you have to do to get it all the time, and it makes it a lot more fun to play.”

It’s definitely been working. Saban has only lost 24 games since taking over at Alabama in 2007 — and five of those losses came in bowl games or national title games. Alabama has one loss this year to Texas A&M, but is still the No. 2 team in the latest CFP rankings.

As you can see, Nick Saban shed some light into some personal coaching details this week — giving us an inside look at the all-time great.