I always get a laugh out of the ESPN.com story that comes out every 6 months about Nick Saban feeling younger than ever. It feels like I can set my calendar to that Chris Low piece coming out at some point in the offseason, and it’ll feature quotes from Saban that say something to the effect of “I’ve never felt younger.”

If you can believe it, my humor has nothing to do with a 70-something coach saying that while navigating one of the most demanding jobs in America, nor does it have anything to do with Low’s reporting, which is second to none.

My humor comes in the “why.”

Why is it that the greatest coach in the history of the sport, who is 1 win from reaching his 10th national championship berth in the past 15 seasons, has to make it a point to remind the world that he plans to continue doing his job?

If you follow this sport closely, you know the answer. It’s recruiting. The only negative recruiting one can do against Alabama is “well, Saban isn’t getting any younger.”

(There’s no way to find this answer, but I’d love to know how many times an opposing coach tried to convince a recruit that Saban wouldn’t be coaching by the time their career was over. That number is in the hundreds. Thousands? Maybe.)

I’ve seen some bring up the question again — would Saban retire if he won it all this year?

I don’t believe so. And not just because there’s probably some recent ESPN story wherein Saban claimed that he’ll “do this as long as they’ll have me.” Sure, it would make for a fitting sendoff. There’s always a chance he retires. Maybe a week post-title, he decides that Boca Grande is calling his and Miss Terry’s name instead of the year-round coaching calendar.

But if I’m a gambling man, I say that Saban has a different vision for whatever his swan song is.

It won’t depend on the result of 1 specific game. Like all things Saban does, it’ll be a premeditated, well-thought-out plan. There’ll be a succession plan. I expect that it won’t be a plan where he’ll sign another elite recruiting class, only to tell those true freshmen that he’s actually calling it a career.

It’s possible that a succession plan has been in the works, or rather, that Saban and Co. aren’t worried about when that succession search takes place. After all, it’s Alabama. It’s a job that plenty of worthy candidates will drop everything for.

It’s just not a route that a whole lot of teams pursue. All the splashy poach jobs of recent memory happened right after the regular season. LSU hired Brian Kelly in November. Lincoln Riley left Oklahoma for USC the day after the Sooners lost the regular-season finale to Oklahoma State. Jimbo Fisher chucked his Christmas trees and left Tallahassee for College Station in the first week of December.

In today’s era of the sport, wherein transfer restrictions are virtually non-existent, I don’t imagine that Alabama would opt for a mid-January hiring. There’s too much 5-star talent on that roster that would be enticed to leave.

(I imagine the opposing coaches who tried to sell recruits on the notion that Saban wasn’t getting younger would fire off texts that just read, “see, told ya so.”)

That doesn’t necessarily mean I think we’ll all know that Saban is about to retire or that he’s about to embark on some season-long retirement tour. You can really only do that if you have an in-house successor, which I don’t believe Saban has that with Kevin Steele or Tommy Rees. Think Mike Krzyzewski with Jon Scheyer. Or if you want a rare college football example, think Bob Stoops with Riley at Oklahoma, Bobby Bowden with Jimbo Fisher at FSU or Rich Brooks with Joker Phillips at Kentucky.

(I guess you can include Urban Meyer with Ryan Day at Ohio State, though I’d hardly point to Meyer as someone who had a perfectly clean break.)

The odds of Alabama following a clean, straightforward succession to Saban are far from guaranteed. The idea of Saban walking off after winning a title is, in theory, clean. In reality, the timing would be messy. Perhaps it would catch Alabama decision-makers by surprise.

We can sit here and try to read tea leaves and overanalyze whether Saban is talking like someone ready to retire, but let’s be honest. We won’t know until we know. The fact that Saban had a 1-word postgame speech after his team’s SEC Championship victory doesn’t mean he’s out of gas (the word was “celebrate”). It means he’s a 72-year-old guy who doesn’t need to deliver an hour-long sermon anymore. The church of Saban shouldn’t be losing followers, internally or externally.

We should, as the college football world, give up the notion that Saban is eventually going to have some multi-year decline. I suppose if Alabama comes short of a national championship, it’ll be his first time at Alabama in which Saban will have not fulfilled the promise to a high school recruit of “come here for 3 years and you’ll win a title.” I don’t know that Saban says that, but I assume a variation of that has been said in living rooms from coast to coast.

So if that’s off the table, the only other way that we can conceive is straight out of a Disney movie.

Maybe that will happen and I’m reading too much into how Saban still coached and adapted in this new era of college football. Perhaps after leading an Alabama team that was left for dead in September, he’ll decide he has nothing left to prove, though one would think passing Paul “Bear” Bryant in the national title department would’ve yielded that at the end of a draining 2020 season.

Nope. He’s still going strong.

Confetti or not, I don’t care that Saban isn’t getting any younger. He’s never looked younger to me.