Steve Spurrier says Nick Saban’s going to coach for basically forever

Steve Spurrier doesn’t think Nick Saban’s close to done yet.

“Nick ain’t thinking about retiring, not even close,” Spurrier told ESPN’s Chris Low in a big story about Saban out this week. “He can go into his 70s easy, and I think he will.”

Saban is 66. But here’s where this gets grim for everyone else:

“I told him he won’t retire until he loses three games in a season,” Spurrier added.

“He told me, ‘If I ever lose three games around here again, they might kill me.’ I think he was joking, but I’m not sure.”

Maybe Saban will lose three games in a year again, sometime. But he hasn’t done that since a 10-3 year in 2010, and Alabama has become the sport’s dominant recruiting (and on-field) power in the years since then. Saban hasn’t gone undefeated since 2009, but he’s made all four College Football Playoffs and — let’s be real — will make a fifth in a row this year.

Saban’s joking about the consequences that would await him if he ever lost that often, but it’s probably true that whenever he decides to walk away, he’ll be leaving behind the best program in college football and a perennial national title contender. It’s a lot harder to leave that than a sinking ship, which is why Spurrier’s analysis appears on point.

Spurrier has been a (mostly lighthearted) antagonist of Saban’s in the past. He’s argued winning at Alabama isn’t all that hard and Saban could’ve won more than he has. He’s also urged Saban to chill out a bit and maybe not put in so many hours.

Low’s profile of Saban is worth reading in full. Another interesting passage in it is this Saban riff on how Alabama keeps continuity despite losing gobs of assistants every year:

“Just because we change people, we don’t change philosophy,” said Saban, whose 2018 staff won’t include a single on-field coach from the 2015 national championship staff in the same role. “We don’t change what we do, how we want to do it or why it’s important to do it a certain way.

”The people that we hire don’t come in and reinvent the wheel. They implement the philosophy that we have. Now, they have input and we make changes. We change all the time. I’m always looking for a better way. And when you get new people, you get new ideas, and that’s a good thing. But the basic core of what we do, we don’t change. You define the expectation for everybody, and this is [Bill] Belichick through and through and where I learned it, because then it’s easy for people who understand what the expectation is to be accountable to it.”

Saban’s ex-assistants are scattered around the country in head coaching jobs. Four of them are in the SEC: Kirby Smart at Georgia, Will Muschamp at South Carolina, and now Jimbo Fisher at Texas A&M and Jeremy Pruitt at Tennessee. The next to beat him head-to-head will be the first.