Paul Finebaum opens up on if Nick Saban would enjoy being on a traveling show

Once the dust settled on the surprising retirement of former Alabama head coach Nick Saban, many became curious if the legendary figure in college football would potentially pursue a future in sports media.

Saban has always been great on the podium and has made a handful of television appearances on ESPN over the years surrounding their college football coverage. But would Saban become a potential fixture on a traveling show like ESPN’s College GameDay? That’s what college football analyst Paul Finebaum was recently asked on ‘The Sports Media Podcast with Richard Deitsch’.

“He’s always been fascinated by being a part of things, in the million times I’ve asked him about retirement he’s always said I’ve been a part of a team my whole life,” Finebaum said. “So that fills some of that need, and I’ll leave it to the critics to decide whether being on the [College] GameDay set is part of a team or not.”

Saban has been featured as a pundit during a few national championship games that he has not been a part of as a coach, also making weekly appearances on ‘The Pat McAfee Show’ during the 2023 football season. But Finebaum doesn’t necessarily see a traveling show as something that would fully interest the 72-year-old former head coach.

“But the things that I wonder about is as you know Richard, you’ve been around television, there’s a great deal of excitement but there’s mostly boredom waiting to go on and I wonder how he would handle that. I know in talking to Rece [Davis] and others,” Finebaum said.

“Saban was out there last year for two days for the national title game, because he was staying in the room next to me so I was watching him come and go. I mean I think he would like it to a degree, but I don’t know if he wants to sit around and have somebody say hey, ‘Coach do you mind, we need you on the 8 o’clock SportsCenter’. That does not seem like him.”

Finebaum may not forecast Saban rubbing elbows with Kirk Herbstreit next football season in a different college town every Saturday. But he does believe that Saban would potentially enjoy a career in the booth calling football games, a proposition that most college football fans could likely get behind.

“I think he would probably, not to be a programer, enjoy doing games more where okay I’ve got Alabama-Georgia this week, I get to look at film all week, I get to dig down on Friday, I talk to the coaches, as opposed to GameDay which is totally unorthodox at times,” Finebaum concluded.