The word around the Alabama football program during fall camp is that Nick Saban seems to be visibly more joyous than usual. In fact, there’s even something approaching empirical data to back that up, as research conducted by AL.com showed the Tide head man has spent 3.42% of his fall camp press conference time cracking a smile, which reporter Matt Stahl found to be double the smile percentage of any year in his research going back to 2017. Speaking exclusively with Sports Illustrated to promote Aflac’s ’23 college football campaign, Saban was asked about just where all this joy is coming from.
“I’m not happier; I’ve always been happy,” Saban says with a chuckle. “People always tell me I don’t smile enough, so I get it. I think maybe as you get a little older you put things in perspective a little bit better and you enjoy the relationships that you’ve been able to develop and have a lot of gratitude for the people around you and the relationships that you’ve been able to develop. I’ve been able to enjoy that a little bit more, I think.”
Maybe that surprises you. It would probably surprise the Saban who took the job in 2007 and whose “ass chewings” are the stuff of legend from those who work for him, as are the occasional sideline blowups. But at Saban’s core is an incessant need to adapt to surroundings as they change around him, so expressing a little more good vibes than usual may not be all that surprising in the end.
