Greg Byrne reveals how he, Alabama prepared for Nick Saban's eventual retirement

Just one week ago, Nick Saban announced his retirement and left Alabama without a head coach for the first time in nearly two decades. There had always been questions about when Saban would step away from the game but once the decision was made, it was a shocking moment. Not too many were prepared for the news but UA athletic director Greg Byrne knew this day would come when he was hired seven years ago.

“One of the worst things I could do, as the AD, is not be prepared when that time came,” Byrne said during a Wednesday appearance on The Paul Finebaum Show. “Hopefully, it wouldn’t come anytime in the near future — and it didn’t, seven years later. So, we obviously had prepared and you do your very best to think about every detail and thought.”

Since retiring, Saban has shared his side of the story, saying he made the decision five minutes before addressing the team. Saban pulled up to Mal Moore expecting a normal day, working hard to prepare for the 2024 season. Alabama was fresh off a loss to Michigan in the Rose Bowl and had a few coaching vacancies.

“I’ve said ‘I think the last day that he’s the head football coach at the University of Alabama, he’ll put a full day in.’ And when I tell you, he did. He was interviewing coaches that morning and we were talking about different things within the program,” Byrne said.

Saban was looking to fill a defensive coordinator role, with Kevin Steele announcing his own retirement a few days earlier. Holmon Wiggins had left Alabama in favor of Texas A&M, joining Mike Elko‘s staff. Had Saban decided to remain coaching, there would have been decisions to make.

Instead, Byrne was the one forced into decisions. Making sure there was communication between everyone involved was the program was a top priority. Byrne also wanted to ensure people not in the facility got the right message and learned of Saban’s retirement.

“We tried our very best to be prepared when that time came,” Byrne said. “We had a detailed plan on how we would handle our young men on our team. How we would handle our staff, how we would handle external communication with the parents, with the media. And then how we would handle trying to find his replacement.”

Nick Saban retirement plan changed for Greg Byrne in modern college football

When Byrne was hired, everyone knew the biggest move of his career would be replacing Saban. At the time, Saban was a decade into his run at Alabama and at some point, it was going to come to an end. It’s just that nobody knew exactly when the moment would come.

Flash forward seven years and college football looks completely different. Byrne could have put together a plan early in his tenure, only to have a ton of different factors play into the decision-making in January 2024.

“In reality, when we first started trying to talk about it, we didn’t have the transfer portal, we didn’t have NIL,” Byrne said. “All of that has added to the pressure of what’s taken place. So, that’s why it was so important to say ‘Let’s do this in a concise period of time without a lot of outside distractions.'”

Once Saban told his team, an action plan was put into place. The coaching search had to immediately start, with Alabama going with an external candidate. A list of names was being populated on the outside but Byrne went to social media, telling people to believe nothing unless it came for him.

Byrne told the players he needed 72 hours to make a hire and he delivered on the promise and then some. Within two days, Kalen DeBoer was Alabama’s new head coach. The search had some crazy moments, including rumors that Dan Lanning was in Tuscaloosa the same night Saban retired.

But all things considered, Byrne will have to feel like the process went smoothly. DeBoer now has the job of hitting the ground running, hoping the transition period goes as well as it possibly can.