Nick Saban on Thursday sat down with ESPN's Rece Davis to explain the timing and reasoning of his abrupt retirement as Alabama's football coach.

Saban retired, by any metric, as a wildly successful coach. The Crimson Tide made the College Football Playoff this year. It slayed the Georgia dragon in Atlanta. And it went undefeated in SEC play, including against rivals Auburn, Tennessee and LSU, led by Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback Jayden Daniels.

However, in an interview with Davis, Saban's reasons for retirement stressed just how difficult it felt to attain all of those milestones in 2023.

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Here's everything you need to know of Saban's decision to retire, as he relayed to Davis:

Why did Nick Saban retire at Alabama?

"I don't think there's any good time," Saban said of his timing to retire. "Especially when you're a coach. Because once you're a coach you think you're gonna be a coach forever. But I actually thought that in hiring coaches, recruiting players, that my age started to become a little bit of an issue. People wanted assurances that I would be here for three years, five years, whatever and that got harder and harder for me to be honest about.

"And to be honest this last season was grueling. 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."

Alabama, of course, started the season 1-1 after a Week 2 non-conference loss to Texas that also cast a cloud over the quarterback situation in Tuscaloosa. The Tide went on to win out, go undefeated in the SEC, defeat Georgia in the SEC championship game and take No. 1 Michigan (the eventual national champion) to overtime at the Rose Bowl.

According to Saban, however, the work that went into that was nothing less than exhausting.

"When people mention the health issue, it was really just the grind of, 'Can you do this the way you wanna do it? Can you do it the way you've always done it? And be able to sustain it and do it for the entire season.' And if I couldn't make a commitment to do that in the future the way I think I have to do it, I thought maybe this 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."

The college world is completely different, and it has undergone a giant facelift in recent years. The transfer portal, NIL, even the way recruiting is covered has made it exponentially more difficult to be a college coach. And according to Saban, it's just hard to keep up with at his age.

"When I was young, I could work till 2 in the morning, get up at 6 (a.m.), and be there the next day, and be full of energy and go for it," he said. "But when you get a little older that gets a little tougher and I'm sure a lot of people can relate to that."

Saban did iterate that it had nothing to do with the players, saying he felt he "could have done a better job if [he] was younger."

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How old is Nick Saban?

Saban is 72 years old, making him the second-oldest coach in major college football at the time of his retirement. (He trailed only North Carolina's Mack Brown, who has him beat by a few months). The legendary Alabama football coach finished the 2023 college football season, his 17th in Tuscaloosa.

It was by far his longest stint in any coaching role, eclipsing the previous highs of five years each at Michigan State (1995-99) and LSU (2000-04). Saban's entire career at Alabama was marked with success, including his final year.

He assured Davis that he and Miss Terry are fine, but ultimately, it was time. The rest of the SEC will undoubtedly thank him. Now Alabama seeks its path forward.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Nick Saban retirement: Alabama football coach cites age as reason, timing