Greg McElroy: Nick Saban ‘stole the show’ at SEC Media Days

Nick Saban — much to the gratitude of 15 other coaches in the league — isn’t the head coach at Alabama anymore. But he still looms plenty large over the SEC as the 2024 season approaches.

Never was that more evident than this past week at SEC Media Days, where Saban was a star of the week in the estimation of his ESPN colleague and former quarterback, Greg McElroy. Speaking of Saban after the event, McElroy heaped praise on Saban for his presence both as a pleasant colleague and a razor-sharp football mind.

“I have not spent that much time with him consecutively in a casual setting in about 15 years,” McElroy said. “So to be able to interact with coach, and for people I think that have always seen him a certain way — when he steps up to the podium, when goes up to the microphone, he has an agenda. He has a point that he wants to get across and that still very much comes through in his time on camera breaking down these teams. We know that. But what I don’t think a lot of people knew was just how funny he is and how he likes to kind of prank you all the time. He wore me out, all week long. Which to me is a good thing. He killed me a couple times, calling me soft on Wednesday night’s show. Telling me that I thought I should call the plays on Wednesday’s show when I was up there alongside Nick Saban and Kalen DeBoer. But the good news is, when he’s ripping you, that’s his love language.”

McElroy was also impressed by getting even more insight into how Saban views the game. He played for Saban for a number of years as the Alabama quarterback, winning the 2010 national championship. But what he gleaned during the days working together on set during SEC Media Days was another level of insight into how Saban sees football, McElroy said.

“And one thing I did not think about, I knew this but I never thought about it: All these coaches think about is not where they’re good, not where they’re elite,” McElroy said. “They don’t think about their good qualities on their roster, they think about the qualities on their roster that could potentially get them beat. And I noticed this when Nick Saban was sitting up there interviewing Kalen DeBoer, sitting there interviewing Steve Sarkisian, and the first question — really the only question — that he wanted to get answered when visiting with those two coaches was, ‘Hey coach, what’s keeping you up at night? Where are you concerned?'”

And that risk-averse mindset that served Saban so well as a head coach also showed up in his Texas–Georgia prediction for the SEC title game matchup, McElroy suspects.

It wasn’t that Saban was necessarily gaming out how the SEC would break for both those teams to follow a path to meeting. He was just picking the two most complete teams in the league as the season begins.

“Those are just the teams with the fewest question marks,” McElroy said. “So he’s looking at it in a risk-averse way of trying to predict what might happen in the SEC season, ‘I’ll take the teams that feel like they have the most questions answered.’ So that was fascinating as well. But he’s the king of media days and was wonderful on the set all week long and we’ll continue to get great perspective from him throughout the football season on ESPN’s College GameDay and I’m sure a bunch of different avenues, as well.”