Rece Davis sat down with Nick Saban right after his retirement for an exclusive one-on-one interview. The two talked for more than a half hour and covered some serious ground. Why now? What’s next for Saban? What’s next for Alabama? (A question Kalen DeBoer is now tasked with answering.)

The longtime voice of college football on ESPN walked away from the interview feeling just how difficult a decision it was for Saban. An Alabama legend and a coaching icon in college football, Saban walked away after helping Alabama to six national championships.

On the College GameDay podcast with Pete Thamel this week, Davis recalled just how surreal the whole experience was when he got to the set of the interview.

“The most surreal, odd thing of that entire morning was when I walked down to his office. It was virtually cleaned out already,” Davis recalled. “There was kind of a profound sense of — he ran the show, everybody knows that, but there was also such a sense of appreciation, I think, and there was this realization amongst a lot of staffers that they had been right in the middle of something really special and it was ending abruptly.”

What Davis described as the mood inside Alabama’s football facilities was surely pretty similar to what so many around the country experienced when news first hit that Saban was officially stepping away from the game.

Alabama had just captured its 16th consecutive 10-win season. Alabama had just won another SEC championship and made it back to the College Football Playoff. With Saban, 72, among the oldest coaches in college football, it was fair to wonder how many years Saban had left in the tank, but few expected that answer to be “zero.”

In the interview with Davis (which can be seen here), Saban described the 2023 season as “grueling.” He said to get that particular Alabama team from where it was to start the season to where it finished took more energy from him than usual.

“I don’t think there’s ever a good time (to retire), especially when you’re a coach,” Saban told Davis. “Because once you’re a coach you think you’re gonna be a coach forever. But 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 three years, five years, whatever. And that got harder and harder for me to be honest about.”