David Cutcliffe officially qualifies as a football “lifer.” He’s now a Special Assistant to the Commissioner for Football Relations in the SEC, but prior to that, he spent 40 years as an assistant and a head coach in the college football ranks.

He coached both Peyton and Eli Manning during his storied career, and he knows how hard it can be to know when to call it quits.

With discussion surrounding Alabama coach Nick Saban and whether or not he’ll retire soon, Cutcliffe weighed in on what makes it hard for lifers to retire during an appearance on “The Paul Finebaum Show” (via On3 Sports):

“Being a part of a team allows you to be a teammate. And the best thing anybody could ever say to an athlete, a coach, is for somebody to come up to you and say, ‘Hey man, you were the best teammate I ever had.’ And I miss trying to be a great teammate, Cutcliffe said. “I think I’m hopefully a part of an organization that is in athletics that can still have that mentality. But we don’t have a scoreboard. And sharing that scoreboard, the elation and the agony … remember the old Wide World of Sports, the ‘agony of defeat.’ And when you share that closely with people, there’s no more closer time than that. It’s just like families during difficult times. Yeah, I miss that part of it big time.

“You wake up as a college coach, and I brought this up to the coaches, ‘You’ll all relate to this, you wake up Sunday — if you’ve been fortunate enough to sleep, but we all fall asleep at some point — but when your eyes open up, you’re dealing immediately with [the previous day’s] results. Good or bad, your mind is moving forward so fast that you don’t have time to hang your head, feel sorry for yourself. [It’s about] what are you going to say to the staff, what are you going to say to the team, what’s the plan? Are we going to get this injury back?’ And it’s funny, right now when I wake up, sometimes I open my eyes and I don’t feel an urgency, and I miss that urgency. I don’t know how to describe it. My wife recognizes it, she’s a veteran coaches’ wife. But I don’t know how to grasp that, there’s some normalcy to that. I do know this: it’s faith, it’s family, then it’s football. And I’ve tried to profess it, now maybe I have a chance to maybe live that a little more closely.”

Lane Kiffin has said he doesn’t think Saban will ever retire. We’ll see what the legendary Alabama coach ends up doing over the next few years, but for now, he’s still the leader of a team many are picking to win the national title in 2022.