Nick Saban told ESPN neither he nor his wife, Terry Saban, are ill.

Saban, who sat down with ESPN's Reece Davis, was asked by Davis whether either was ill.

"There's no illness," Saban said. "Miss Terry's fine. I'm fine. It was, can you sustain the season from a mental grind standpoint?"

Saban, 72, retired on Wednesday after 17 seasons coaching Alabama football, winning six national championships, 10 SEC West titles and nine SEC championships.

Davis asked Saban why he decided now was the right time to retire.

"I don't think there's any good time, especially when you're a coach," Saban said. "Once you're a coach, you think you're going to be a coach forever. I actually thought in hiring coaches and recruiting players that my age started to become a little bit of an issue. People wanted assurances that I would be here for 3 years, 5 years, and that got harder and harder for me to be honest about. To be honest, this last season was grueling. It was a real grind for us to come from where we started to where we got to. Took a little more out of me than usual. When people mentioned the health issue, it was really just the grind of, can you do this the way you want to do it? Can you do it the way you've always done it and be able to sustain it for the entire season? If I couldn't make a commitment to do that in the future the way I think I have to do it, I think this maybe was the right time based on those two sets of circumstances. Like I said, there's never a good time, but I thought maybe this was the right time."

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Nick Kelly is the Alabama beat writer for The Tuscaloosa News, part of the USA TODAY Network, and he covers Alabama football and men's basketball. Reach him at nkelly@gannett.com or follow him @_NickKelly on X, the social media app formerly known as Twitter.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Nick Saban said he and Miss Terry are not ill