Wall Street Journal
By Laine Higgins
November 2, 2024, 8:00 am EDT
Nick Saban Was the Greatest Coach in College Football. Now He’s the One Getting Coached.
The former Alabama coach is embarking on a new career as a TV analyst—and he’s attacking the job with the same single-minded pursuit of excellence he displayed on the sidelines
Nick Saban shocked the sport of college football when he abruptly retired from Alabama last January. After 50 years and seven national championships,
he was done with coaching.
But it turns out coaching wasn’t entirely done with him.
Ten months later, Saban is still grinding through game film, searching for weaknesses and striving to achieve a higher level of performance. The difference now is that he’s the one getting coached up.
Shortly after leaving Alabama, Saban was announced as the newest addition to the cast of “College GameDay”—ESPN’s long-running Saturday morning pregame show. And as he works through his debut season as an on-air analyst, the 73-year-old who oversaw 292 wins from the sideline says the transition to TV has cast him in the role of incoming freshman.
“The pace is completely different,” Saban said in an interview.
“There’s not the same stress level, [but] you want to do a good job.”
To do that job, Saban has displayed the same critical eye and single-minded pursuit of excellence that led the Crimson Tide to nine national championship appearances in 17 years. He had been in his new job barely a few weeks when Saban approached the ESPN producers with a blunt request.
“I’m the rookie here. I need you to stay on top of me,” said Matthew Garrett, the coordinating producer of “GameDay.” “I want you to coach me hard. I want you to give me feedback, positive and negative. He calls me every week—the first thing he asks is ‘What can I do better’?”
So far, the answer is not much. Saban hasn’t been on the receiving end of the trademark “ass-chewings” he once doled out as a coach, mostly because he approaches his new job with the same level of dedication that characterized his coaching career.
Conscious of the fact that he needed to learn about dozens of college football programs that he never encountered at Alabama—”I had no idea about Nebraska or Oregon!” he says—Saban spent the offseason watching hours of film. To prepare for SEC Media Days, he pored over footage from the spring game for each of the league’s 16 teams. For his weekly film room segment on “GameDay,” he hand selects the clips of plays that best illustrate his points.
He estimates that he spends about three to four hours per day preparing for each Saturday show. It’s a big drop off from the 14-hour days he worked at Alabama, but producers say that his level of preparation shines through on the screen.
“I spend a lot of time telling him if I had things for you to do better, I’d be more than happy to share them,” Garrett said. “But he’s very, very, very good at this.”
In fact, Saban’s fiercest critic might be Saban himself. While taping a film room segment on Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel last month, the former coach was unhappy with his performance. Even after a second take, he wasn’t satisfied. “There’s some things I could have done better,” Saban informed the room.
That Saban is hard to please will come as no surprise to anyone who watched him scowling on the sidelines over the last four decades. But his turn as an analyst is also showing off a side of him that few outside of Tuscaloosa ever got to glimpse.
Saban’s deadpan delivery and wisecracking remarks have made him an unlikely foil to Pat McAfee, the rodeo clown of “GameDay” who is 36 years his junior. “We’re Abbott and Costello,” Saban said before last week’s show at Indiana University.
Saban’s insights and his odd couple-dynamic with McAfee have been a hit with TV audiences. The show is averaging 2.2 million viewers per week, up 9% from
2023, and this season is on pace to become the most-watched in the show’s 38-year history.
Still, the producers believe there is more to come from Saban. Unlike McAfee, the former coach has the tendency to hesitate before jumping into discussions on set—he’s less timid during Friday morning production meetings. “We have all been very aggressive in telling him, ‘Any time you want to say something, you say something’,” Garrett said.
It’s been hard for Saban to shake all his old habits. During those hours of film watching, he often finds himself scheming up ways to stop exotic offenses or block blitzes. In these moments, his wife chimes in. “Miss Terry always says, ‘It’s not your problem’,” he says.
As long as they have been married, Terry Saban has coached her husband behind the scenes. She’s still at it, texting the show’s makeup artist if ever there’s an errant bump in his hair. She got a star turn on the show in September, serving as guest picker when the show traveled to Alabama ahead of the Crimson Tide’s game against Georgia. She correctly guessed the winner in seven out of nine games, outperforming her husband—and every other guest who has appeared on the show this season.
“Oh yeah, she tore me up,” Saban said. “I haven’t heard the end of that, either.”
The only time things get a little uncomfortable on set these days is when the topic of discussion moves to Alabama. Saban tries to be diplomatic when discussing his former team, but sometimes ends up speaking in vague terms. “I just don’t want to be caught in the middle,” he says.
Still, his feelings about the Crimson Tide aren’t hard to discern. At the end of each show, the “GameDay” analysts predict the outcomes for the big games of the week. Saban hasn’t picked against Alabama once.
“I don’t want to be judgmental and come across that way in terms of what they’re doing and how they’re doing it,” Saban says. “I do want them to have success.”
Write to Laine Higgins at
laine.higgins@wsj.com
www.si.com
247sports.com
