Chris Low has a big piece on Nick Saban navigating life without football up on ESPN.com on Tuesday. Much of the focus is on Saban settling into civilian life like he's an extra-terrestrial life form pretending to be human: He fills his own prescriptions and opens his own mail! He doesn't know who 50 Cent and Travis Scott are!
The most illuminating anecdote, I thought, was that Saban somehow being unaware of Rama Jama's, which has served burgers and Crimson Tide nostalgia in the shadow of Bryant-Denny Stadium since 1996.
But the meat of the article was detailing how Saban spends his time when he's not at the pharmacy or getting a blanket for Miss Terry as they watch Game of Thrones.
The Sabans will still spend the majority of their time in Tuscaloosa, where Miss Terry will continue conducting her charity work (with more help from her husband), while Nick will continue keeping regular office hours.
He still leaves the house before 7 a.m., but now cuts out at 4 p.m. at the latest. Some days end at lunchtime.
Saban has moved out of the Mal M. Moore Athletic Facility and now keeps a windowless office above the south end zone of Bryant-Denny Stadium. He spends some time organizing decades of notes -- a meeting before his Dolphins played the Oakland Raiders had just been revisited for the first time since 2005 -- so (and this is me completely speculating) hopefully a memoir will be on the horizon at some point.
Without a team to coach, the greatest college football coach of all time is staying busy. He's spending more time with family, doing more public speaking, and also spending more time on his businesses while gearing up for his new career. He's taken a job with ESPN, as we know, and that will begin with the Worldwide Leader's NFL draft coverage next month, where Saban will be an active participant.
In the weeks since Saban stepped away, there has been much debate about whether the recent changes bringing free agency and NIL into college pushed him away. The implication being that, if they did, then they are net negatives to college football, and the game is self-evidently worse now than it was just a few years ago.
Saban has said enough on the topic for others to chime in with their own interpretation, but I thought this quote was one of the most illuminating things he's said since Jan. 10.
"The biggest change for me as a person is that I lived my whole life for the last 50 years being in a hurry," Saban told ESPN. "It was, 'Hurry up to go here. Hurry up to go there. Don't be late for this meeting. You've got another meeting in an hour. What are you going to say to the staff? What are you going to say to the team?'
"I mean, it was just deadline after deadline after deadline. Even when I was driving to the lake to go on vacation, I'd be in a hurry, and for what? But that's just how you were built."