David Cutcliffe on why retiring from coaching is difficult for lifers like Nick Saban

Retiring from the game of football is never easy for most college football coaches across the country. For people like Alabama head coach Nick Saban, retiring and kicking his feet up on the beach are just things that are not in his schedule. In February, the Alabama head coach scoffed at retirement questions from media members. Former Duke head coach David Cutcliffe went on The Paul Finebaum Show on Wednesday afternoon in Destin, Fla. and talked about why it’s so hard for lifers of the game like Saban to ride off into the sunset.

“Being apart of a team allows you to be a teammate. And the best thing anybody could ever say to an athlete, a coach, is for somebody to come up to you and say, ‘Hey man, you were the best teammate I ever had.’ And I miss trying to be a great teammate. I think I’m hopefully a part of an organization that is in athletics that can still have that mentality. But we don’t have a scoreboard. And sharing that scoreboard, the elation and the agony … remember the old Wide World of Sports, the ‘agony of defeat.’ And when you share that closely with people, there’s no more closer time than that. It’s just like families during difficult times. Yeah, I miss that part of it big time.

“You wake up as a college coach, and I brought this up to the coaches, ‘You’ll all relate to this, you wake up Sunday — if you’ve been fortunate enough to sleep, but we all fall asleep at some point — but when your eyes open up, you’re dealing immediately with [the previous day’s] results. Good or bad, your mind is moving forward so fast that you don’t have time to hang your head, feel sorry for yourself. [It’s about] what are you going to say to the staff, what are you going to say to the team, what’s the plan? Are we going to get this injury back? And it’s funny, right now when I wake up, sometimes I open my eyes and I don’t feel an urgency, and I miss that urgency. I don’t know how to describe it. My wife recognizes it, she’s a veteran coaches’ wife. But I don’t know how to grasp that, there’s some normalcy to that. I do know this: it’s faith, it’s family, then it’s football. And I’ve tried to profess it, now maybe I have a chance to maybe live that a little more closely,” Cutcliffe said.

The SEC is currently having their Spring Meetings in Destin this week. Finebaum is down there to cover the event, as well as talk to a variety of people across the college football landscape on his show. Cutcliffe’s current role is special assistant to the Commissioner for Football Relations. In the SEC’s press release in announcing the role for Cutcliffe, it said that he “will provide guidance to the SEC Commissioner’s office for the purpose of enhancing the overall quality of football competition in the SEC in areas including game management, communications, playing rules, national policies and scheduling best practices.”

Nick Saban has talked about retirement a few times in the past year

“Everybody asks me when I wanna retire. Retire from what?” Saban said to a crowd of coaches in Montgomery, Ala. in January. “I’m gonna jump into an empty abyss, aight, of what am I going to do? Because the very challenges that I talk about and the things in our profession that concern me – for you and for me both, in your game and our game – that’s what keeps me going. That’s why I get up every day. That’s why I can’t sleep at night sometimes.

“So why would you quit doing that? I haven’t figured that one out yet.”

This isn’t the first time that Nick Saban has spoken on his retirement. After his 70th birthday this past season, the coach said in an interview with AL.com that he has no timetable for making that decision.

“I just kind of keep on keeping on,” Saban said. “I don’t have a timetable for anything. The only thing that I’ve ever said is that if I felt like I was riding the program down or I wasn’t able to make a positive contribution to the program, then that would probably be time to let somebody else carry the torch.”

Based on the sustained success over the past few years, Saban isn’t showing any signs of reaching that point even as he ages. The Crimson Tide reloaded this offseason with the No. 2 recruiting class according to On3’s Team Consensus Rankings, so expect them to once again be in the national conversation next season.

Alabama will kick off their 2022 season on Sept. 3 against the Utah State Aggies.

On3’s Chandler Vessels also contributed to this article.