Nick Saban says he and Miss Terry are both fine: 'There's no illness'

Nick Saban offered a little more detail about his decision to retire and the health of both he and his wife, Terry, after stating last season was difficult from “a health standpoint.”

“There’s no illness,” said Saban in a sitdown with ESPN’s Rece Davis. “Miss Terry is fine, I’m fine. But it was the, can you sustain the season from just a mental grind standpoint? When I was young, I could work to two in the morning, get up at six and be there the next day and be full of energy and go for it. But when you get a little older, that gets a little tougher, and I’m sure a lot of people can relate to that.” 

Saban, the head football coach at Alabama for the last 17 seasons, announced he was retiring on Wednesday. He told the team in a routine meeting at the Mal M. Moore Athletic Facility one day ago, and sources confirmed to BamaOnLine that Saban cited his age and health concerns as a reason for stepping away. He explained that further with Davis on Thursday.

“I don’t think there’s any good time, especially when you’re a coach, because once you’re a coach, you think you’re gonna be a coach forever,” Saban said. “But I actually thought that in hiring coaches, recruiting players, that my age started to become a little bit of an issue. People wanted assurances that I would be here for three years, five years, whatever, and that got harder and harder for me to be honest about. 

Saban continued, “And to be honest, this last season was grueling. It was a real grind for us to come from where we started to where we got to. Took a little more out of me than usual. And when people mentioned the health issue, it was really just the grind of, ‘Can you do this the way you want to do it? Can you do it the way you’ve always done it and be able to sustain it and do it for the entire season?’ 

“And if I couldn’t make a commitment to do that in the future, the way I think I have to do it, I thought maybe this was the right time based on those two sets of circumstances that, like I said, there’s never a good time, but I thought maybe this was the right time.” 

Davis asked if there was an example of something that happened this past season – one that saw Alabama overcome a Week 2 loss to Texas to win its next 11 games, beat Georgia in the SEC Championship Game and reach the College Football Playoff before losing to Michigan in the Rose Bowl semifinal – that took more out of him than previous years of coaching. 

“I think that my role was a little different this year,” Saban said. “I was more involved with the defense, had to be more involved with the defense. That took a little more time, put a little more stress on me. Made me feel like maybe I wasn’t doing as good a job as I needed to in other parts of our team. And I just have a high standard for how I do things, and if I feel like I’m not living up to that standard, I’m really disappointed. 

“I wasn’t disappointed in the season. I wasn’t disappointed in the team. I wasn’t disappointed in the players. In fact, this team was fun to coach, they came a long ways and I was really proud of the way everybody bought in and did what they did to have the success that we had. But at the same time, I felt like I could have done a better job if I was younger (laughs).”

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