Every offseason, it seems like, Alabama head coach Nick Saban is associated with open head coaching jobs in the NFL and at top-tier college football programs. During a Sunday interview with former Orange Bowl committee president Sean Pittman, Saban was asked if there was an “ultimate job” for the 68-year-old coach, or if that is what he currently has at Alabama?

“I think I’m in it now because I have no circumstance that would interest me in leaving in any way, shape or form, which it’s been that way for a long time,” Saban said on The Sean Pittman Show. “This will be my 14th season, so we enjoy it here. The people are very committed to having the best program in the country and doing everything they can to help the players be successful, and that’s the ultimate goal that we have. We enjoy the success and the quality of people and players that we’ve been able to attract here. It’s been a lot of fun.”

In 13 years at the head of the Crimson Tide football program, Saban has accumulated a 157-23 record and has won five national championships and six SEC titles. Saban came to Tuscaloosa in 2007 after two seasons as the head coach of the Miami Dolphins, where he posted a 15-17 record. Pittman asked the longest-tenured SEC coach what happened in the NFL?

“I spent eight years total in the NFL, and I really enjoyed coaching in the NFL,” Saban said. “There’s a lot of positive things about competing at the highest level with the best players, and probably the most parity that the league has, which the league’s built on parity -- all the rules try to make the teams as equal as positive, and I think that makes for a lot of great competition, lots of close games. So, there’s a lot of good things about it. I’ve always really loved college football, and every time I went to the NFL, I always came back to college. I was a secondary coach at the Houston Oilers. I came back to be the head coach at Toledo. I went to the Cleveland Browns the defensive coordinator for (Bill) Belichick and ended up going back to Michigan State as the head coach. I always thought that the ultimate goal was to be a head coach in the NFL, but all the time that I coached in the NFL, we didn’t have free agency. You had the same players on your team for a long time. It was a little bit different.

“When I went to the Miami Dolphins, we had free agency, we had a salary cap. I know you’ve heard the story about Drew Brees, and we were going to sign him in Miami and we didn’t pass him on the physical, so we couldn’t sign him and he went to New Orleans and had a great career, won a Super Bowl, been in the Pro Bowl lots of times. I just thought that when we missed the window of getting the quarterback that we were going to have a hard time being successful there. We didn’t have a quarterback. When I went to the Dolphins, we were the oldest team. We were $17 million over the salary cap. We didn’t have any draft picks because they’d given them away to get Ricky Williams. So, it was an uphill struggle, and we turned it around the first year and won nine games. The second year, we traded for Daunte Culpepper when the Drew Brees deal went south on the medical. He was injured and on IR and we really didn’t have a quarterback, and we actually had a better team.

“I just felt like we could control our own destiny in college a lot better, and I love college football because I thought you could have a greater impact on young people at the 18- to 22-year-old timeframe, aight. And I love the NFL and I love the players … but your leadership and your influence and the kind of program that you can have to try to get players to do things that are going to help them be more successful in life, probably you can have a greater impact in college than you can in the NFL. I’ve always enjoyed that. My family always enjoyed it. My wife’s always been really involved with it. We’ve been very happy being in college football. But sometimes you learn about yourself when you do things like go to the NFL and you learn about yourself -- ‘Oh, this is not exactly what I thought it was going to be. Look what I left. I left something that I loved.’ And I loved it at LSU, when I left LSU to go to the Miami Dolphins. You live and learn, I guess.”

Alabama head coach Nick Saban

As he has outlined many times before, Saban’s ultimate goal is to get his players to be the best versions of themselves -- as people, students and football players. That’s what drives him. But he also does what he does because he loves being around those said players daily.

“I don’t think if you would ask people that are internally involved in our program, any player, that they see me like the media sees me,” Saban said. “I have a lot of fun with the players. The players enjoy playing in our program. I guess I don’t smile much … but I have a lot of fun with the players, and I think they enjoy being in the program. They all love coming back and are very proud of what they’ve accomplished there because, really, the fun of it and the fun of anything is really having success at what you’re doing. And a lot of players that had a lot of success on and off the field, they get a lot of positive self-gratification from that. It was a lot of hard work that went into it, but they feel good about it. We’re happy to see them doing well.”

Should football season start on time -- or happen at all -- amid the novel coronavirus pandemic, Saban will guide the Tide for a 14th year. It will be his 25th year as a head coach at the college level but has featured an offseason neither Saban nor anyone else has experienced. But in his new-found “downtime,” Saban is still tirelessly preparing for the next challenge.

With all of that in mind, does he have any advice for his younger self in this time of reflection?

“I think coaching is teaching, teaching is the ability to inspire learning,” Saban said. “I think when I first started coaching, I was more outcome-oriented, and I think sometimes outcomes can be distractions. Through my coaching career, I’ve gotten much more process-oriented, which means focus on the things you need to do to get the outcome that you want. I think that’s probably something that would help a lot of young people coming up.

“Whatever they want to do is have the discipline to stay focused not on the outcome but the things that you need to do to get the outcome. That’s probably where I’ve changed the most, and that’s where the process comes in. And if you have the discipline to stick with the process and you believe in it and you trust in it, I think that’s the best way you can have success.”

Listen to Saban’s full interview with Sean Pittman by CLICKING HERE.

Contact Charlie Potter by personal message or on Twitter (@Charlie_Potter).