AP

Nick Saban has become one of the best college football coaches of all time. But 10 years after a mediocre two-season stint with the Dolphins ended, Saban continues to be regarded also as a failed former NFL coach.

Despite this blemish on the permanent record of a tortured perfectionist, it appears that Saban won’t be coming back to the NFL, ever.

“I guess there was a time when I said, ‘O.K. if you win a national championship in college, because I was a pro coach for however many years I was, it’s time to go win the Super Bowl. That would make my career complete,” Saban told Emily Kaplan of TheMMQB.com. “But when I did that, I found out that I missed some of these things about college that were really important to me. So you learn about yourself. I just decided when I came back here, I wasn’t going to think about that any more. . . . I used to think at the end of the day, being a head coach in the NFL was the No. 1 thing. But when I got to that, it was like, ‘Well maybe you already had the No. 1 thing for you and what you like.'”

College football is No. 1 for Saban because his recruiting skills allow him to create a competitive advantage at that level. At the NFL level, constrained by the draft and the salary cap and grown men who may be more likely to be skeptical about the things said to get a kid to sign a letter of intent, Saban wasn’t able to round up better players across the board.

Still, as Saban continues to have his legacy become legend at the college level, NFL teams will be interested.

“I’ve had other opportunities to go to the NFL, and I’ve just chosen not to do it,” Saban said. At some point, those opportunities may come with a dollar figure that is too much to refuse — especially if the offer comes from an owner who is willing to pay a gigantic amount of money and who has a franchise quarterback under contract and enough other pieces to make Saban think that he’d be walking into a situation with a deck stacked in his favor.