Saban ready to support Alabama in transition
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Chris Low, ESPN Senior Writer
On the first day of his retirement in the wake of a legendary coaching career, Nick Saban was still thinking team first.
He wasn’t playing golf, planning a vacation or even sleeping in for an extra hour. Like every other morning for the past 17 years as Alabama‘s football coach, he was driving to the office — always there by 7:20 a.m. sharp at the latest.
“I want to be there for the players, for the coaches, anything I can do to support them during this transition,” Saban told ESPN in his first public comments since retiring Wednesday, a move that reverberated throughout the sports world and shocked even those who were closest to him within the Alabama program.
“There are a lot of things to clean up, to help as we move forward. I’m still going to have a presence here at the university in some form and trying to figure out all that and how it works. This is a place that will never be too far away from Miss Terry’s and my hearts.”
Saban informed his staff and players that he was retiring during a 4 p.m. meeting in the team room Wednesday. It wasn’t a long meeting, less than 10 minutes, and Saban said it was important to him that they hear the news first from him.
“I wanted them to know how much they meant to me,” said Saban, who won six national championships at Alabama and another one at LSU. “It was hard, all of it was. The last few days have been hard. But look, it’s kind of like I told the players. I was going to go in there and ask them to get 100 percent committed to coming back and trying to win a championship, but I’ve always said that I didn’t want to ride the program down, and I felt whether it was recruiting or hiring coaches, now that we have people leaving, the same old issue always sort of came up — how long are you going to do this for?”
Jeff Allen, Alabama’s head athletic trainer, has been with Saban all 17 years. He’s the last football staff member remaining that Saban hired from the outside when Saban took the job at Alabama in 2007. Allen was emotional Thursday even talking about Saban’s retirement.
“This is one of those days you knew was going to come, but when it does, you’re still somewhat in shock that it finally has come,” Allen said. “I don’t want to say it was a grieving process, because he’s still here, but what’s helped us process it all is how he’s managed it. He’s in the office today and wants to still be a part of this place. It was special for me this morning when I was with him, just hearing him talk about how important it was for him for Alabama to continue to be successful. That means the world to all of us who are here and love this place and want to see what he’s built continue to grow.”
Saban, 72, said his age made it increasingly more difficult for him to do the job the way he demanded of himself that it should be done. He told ESPN last month that 14-hour days were a lot harder to navigate at 72 than they were at 62 and reiterated that on Thursday.
“Last season was difficult for me from just a health standpoint, not necessarily having anything major wrong, but just being able to sustain and do things the way I want to do them, the way I’ve always done them,” Saban said. “It just got a little bit harder. So you have to decide, ‘OK, this is sort of inevitable when you get to my age.'”
Saban added that it would have been unfair to everybody to keep saying that he was going to be at Alabama for four or five more years.
“Which I would have been happy to try to do, but I just didn’t feel like I could do that and didn’t want to get into a year-to-year deal that doesn’t help anybody and doesn’t help you continue to build and be at the standard that I want to be at and want this program to be at,” Saban said.
At no time did Saban consider scaling back his responsibilities or transitioning into more of a CEO role as a head coach. He’s renowned for being hands-on in everything that touches his program. He said he finalized his decision to retire after returning from a trip to his home in Florida with his wife, Terry, last weekend. Saban was still interviewing potential assistant coaches via Zoom on Tuesday and Wednesday. In fact, he was talking with a potential receivers coach about an hour before telling the team that he was retiring.
“It’s the way I’ve always done things,” Saban said. “You keep working right up until it’s time to walk away. I think when you get away from doing what you’ve always done, you’re never going to be as effective. And that’s just sort of it. I knew it was time.”
Saban has expressed disdain over the past few years for the lack of uniformity in college football, especially regarding NIL being used as a guise for pay-for-play and the transfer portal and all the tampering that has occurred with players moving from school to school.
Saban was insistent, though, that the changing landscape in college football was not the reason he was leaving.
“Don’t make it about that. It’s not about that,” Saban said. “To me, if you choose to coach, you don’t need to be complaining about all that stuff. You need to adjust to it and adapt to it and do the best you can under the circumstances and not complain about it. Now, I think everybody is frustrated about it. We had an SEC conference call, 14 coaches on there [Wednesday], and there’s not one guy you can talk to who really understands what’s happening in college football and thinks that it’s not an issue.
“But [his retirement] ain’t about that. We’ve been in this era for three years now, and we’ve adapted to it and won in this era, too. It’s just that I’ve always known when it would be time to turn it over to somebody else, and this is that time.”
Saban, who loves playing golf, has made it a point to never play during the season except for maybe during the open week. He made his first hole-in-one during the open date before the LSU game in 2016. Now that he’s retired, Saban pushed back on the notion that he’d be able to get his handicap down under 5.
“I don’t think that’s going to happen, but we’ll be able to play more than we used to,” he said with a laugh.
Over the years, Saban has joked “What the hell else am I going to do?” any time he was asked about retiring from coaching. His late father was a Pop Warner coach in their Monongah, West Virginia, community, and Saban broke into the coaching ranks in 1973 as a graduate assistant at Kent State under Don James.
But now that he is retiring after 30 years as a head coach in the college and NFL ranks, Saban said, “There’s a lot I can do and a lot I want to do,” adding that it was important to him that he still had the quality of life remaining to do all of those things after he quit coaching.
“There’s life after football, but I’m always going to be here for Alabama however they need me,” Saban said.
Allen met privately with Saban on Thursday morning and said his longtime boss paused briefly before telling Allen how much he had meant to him.
“But he’s been doing that all morning with everybody, literally walking around and thanking people,” Allen said. “One of our custodians came up to me and said how much she was going to miss him and miss cleaning his office and how well he had treated her. People don’t always see that side of him. But all this being said, we also know what he wants us to do is to move on in the right way and help the new coach to continue to be successful, and that’s the way we can best honor Coach Saban.”
Sports
From Ohtani’s two-way return to becoming the villains of baseball: Five questions facing Dodgers in spring training
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Alden Gonzalez
PECOTA, the popular projection system by Baseball Prospectus, released its estimated win totals for the 2025 season earlier this week. And though you probably won’t be surprised to learn which team sits on top, it’s important to note by how much.
The Los Angeles Dodgers project for a whopping 104 victories in 2025, according to PECOTA, 12 more than the second-place Atlanta Braves. In thousands of simulated seasons, the Dodgers made the playoffs 99.6% of the time. Their chances of winning the World Series — and becoming the first repeat champions in more than 20 years — sit at 21.5%, nearly three times more than anybody else’s. And if you’re waiting for this run of dominance to subside, have some patience — ESPN’s Kiley McDaniel has ranked the Dodgers’ farm system first in the industry heading into the season.
“It’s a great time to be a Dodger,” Mookie Betts said during the team’s annual fan event at Dodger Stadium last weekend, attended by a capacity crowd of 25,000.
It’s also a busy time.
The Dodgers played into late October while defeating the New York Yankees in the 2024 World Series and will begin the season more than a week early, opening up against the Chicago Cubs in Japan on March 18. Their spring training is nigh. Dodgers pitchers and catchers will undergo their physical exams in Glendale, Arizona, on Monday. The first official workout will follow the next morning, at which point throngs of fans, both domestic and international, will crowd the backfields of Camelback Ranch to catch an up-close look at one of the most talented teams in baseball history.
The Dodgers, division champs 11 out of the past 12 years, are about as certain to make the playoffs as any team has ever been. But they face some fascinating questions heading into the start of camp.
Below is a look through the five most compelling.
1. What will Shohei Ohtani‘s return to hitting and pitching look like?
It’s important to remember what Ohtani is setting out to do this season. It’s not merely that he’ll return to being the second two-way star in baseball history — and the first since Babe Ruth, who didn’t juggle pitching and hitting for as long as Ohtani already has. It’s that he will be doing so coming off an entire season spent rehabbing a second repair of his ulnar collateral ligament, and mere months removed from surgery to his non-throwing shoulder after sustaining a torn labrum during the World Series.
At a time when the sport is more specialized, more skilled and more difficult than ever, what Ohtani is attempting is virtually impossible for everybody on the planet except him. Trying to project how his 2025 season will play out, then, seems foolish. And yet Ohtani has defied expectations so often, the sentiment among his teammates is that he will be just as great as he always is.
“I think Shohei’s going to be Shohei,” Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman said last weekend. “I just don’t see how he’s not.”
Freeman recalled the World Series workout at Yankee Stadium on the afternoon of Oct. 27. A day earlier, Ohtani had suffered a gruesome left shoulder injury while attempting to steal a base. And yet he was able to reach his ailing arm over his head, which Freeman never recalled someone having the strength to do after popping a shoulder out of place. “How is this man doing this?” Freeman thought.
Ohtani went on to play in the next three games, helping lead the Dodgers to their first full-season championship in four decades. Three weeks later, he won his third unanimous MVP in four years — after the first 50/50 season. Then he began preparing as both a pitcher and a hitter again.
Ohtani is already hitting, and Dodgers manager Dave Roberts has seen videos of him producing exit velocities in the triple digits. He has also been playing catch for the better part of two months, but the Dodgers won’t get a true sense for his pitching timeline until spring training begins and bullpen sessions follow.
Ohtani is expected to hit at the start of the season, but in all likelihood he won’t be part of the rotation until May. The Dodgers want him peaking as a pitcher by season’s end and don’t want to have to shut him down at midseason to get him there. So far, Ohtani said Saturday, “things are pretty smooth.” But there’s no telling how this will actually go. This is unprecedented territory, riddled with unique quirks (an example: Ohtani can’t venture out on a rehab assignment to face hitters in April, as any other rehabbing pitcher would, because he’s too valuable to the Dodgers’ lineup).
And yet greatness is expected nonetheless.
“I don’t know about 50/50 because I truly don’t know how he’s going to go about stealing bases while he’s pitching,” Freeman said. “But maybe he steals 50 bases before he starts pitching in May or whenever. I wouldn’t put anything past him.”
2. How will Betts handle shortstop?
Yes, the Dodgers are planning on Betts being their every-day shortstop this season. No, there really isn’t any precedent for something like this. Not for a player of this caliber. Not for moving to shortstop, the most demanding position outside of catcher, in the back half of one’s career. But Betts, like Ohtani, is an unprecedented athlete, and the Dodgers have expressed confidence that he can make an incredibly challenging transition if given an entire offseason to work at it.
And Betts sure has worked. He has communicated on a near-daily basis with Chris Woodward, the former Texas Rangers manager and new Dodgers infield coach, at times recruiting him to take ground balls on random fields throughout Los Angeles because Dodger Stadium is undergoing a major renovation. Shortly after the fan event last weekend, he reported to the team’s spring training facility, nearly two weeks before he was scheduled to arrive.
Said Betts: “I feel like I’m just a completely new person over there.”
Betts, a six-time Gold Glove Award winner in right field, has longed to return to his roots in the middle infield basically since he joined the Dodgers. Second base seemed like the natural fit, until Gavin Lux‘s throwing issues last spring prompted a last-minute pivot to shortstop. Betts started 61 games there before a broken wrist kept him out nearly two months and pushed him back to right field upon his return. At season’s end, Betts and the Dodgers sat down and determined he’d make another run at it.
Betts committed nine errors at shortstop last season, though eight were the result of errant throws. Dodgers coaches said he mastered aspects they believe to be the most difficult at the position — getting off the ball, exhibiting range and fielding tough hops. The problem was getting his elite arm to translate from the outfield to the infield, most of which is a matter of footwork and (basically) reps, of which he will now get plenty.
If Betts’ shortstop transition doesn’t go well, the Dodgers can pivot to Tommy Edman, Miguel Rojas or the newly signed Hyeseong Kim, moving Betts to second base. But they’re going to give him every chance to stick at the position, at least in 2025.
“He is very confident about it,” Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman said earlier this offseason. “And I will happily take the side of betting on Mookie and let any fool that wants to take the other side.”
3. How will Roki Sasaki’s transition to MLB work?
Friedman referred to the dynamic with Sasaki, the pitching phenom he’d spent years chasing, as a “partnership.” The Dodgers have pledged to do whatever it takes to help Sasaki achieve his goal of becoming the first Japanese-born pitcher to win a Cy Young Award and, most importantly, stay healthy.
Sasaki, 23, is already an elite pitcher with an exceedingly high ceiling. But evaluators throughout baseball have expressed workload concerns, especially coming off a season in which his fastball exhibited a drop in velocity. Sasaki totaled just 202 innings with the Chiba Lotte Marines over the past two years. He is supremely athletic, but he is also wiry, and he has been throwing in the triple digits since high school. His right arm is special, but it is also vulnerable — a major test for a Dodgers team that has struggled mightily to keep young arms healthy in recent years.
The thought from several scouts during Sasaki’s posting process was that whichever team acquired him would start him late, given he might not throw more than about 150 innings in 2025. But the Dodgers won’t do that. Friedman said during Sasaki’s introductory press conference last month that he would “hit the ground running” in spring training and added that he will begin the season in the rotation if he’s ready, with no designated innings limit.
“Our goal is to start him,” Friedman said. “He’s going to go and start the season and we will continue to work with him in between starts.”
The Dodgers will spend a good portion of spring working with Sasaki to rekindle his four-seam-fastball velocity, part of which will consist of a more thorough examination of how his delivery might have been altered to account for prior injuries. They’ll also begin to tweak his pitch mix in an effort to play up his wipeout splitter, perhaps by helping Sasaki introduce more cutters and two-seamers.
But one of the Dodgers’ biggest tasks will be mapping out a rotation loaded with stars but riddled with injury concerns, including Sasaki, Ohtani, Tyler Glasnow (whose modest 134 innings total in 2024 was the most in his nine-year career), Yoshinobu Yamamoto (who missed three months with a strained rotator cuff last season), Tony Gonsolin (who is coming off Tommy John surgery), Dustin May (who made a combined 26 starts from 2021 to 2024) and Blake Snell (who has thrown less than 160 innings in four of his past five full seasons).
4. They’re done adding players … right?
Snell was the first impact player to join the Dodgers this offseason. He thought they were done adding with every subsequent move — after Michael Conforto, after Teoscar Hernández, after Kim, after Sasaki, after Tanner Scott, after Kirby Yates. At some point, Snell will be right — but perhaps not yet.
A “Kiké!” chant broke out at one point during DodgerFest, and the expectation is the Dodgers will eventually bring back Enrique Hernández, the effervescent, ever-popular super-utility player who has a knack for coming through in October. If they do — and they keep Chris Taylor, who’s in the last year of a four-year, $60 million deal — then only one position player spot will be up for grabs in spring training.
It would seemingly come down to a competition between Kim and two young-but-established outfielders in Andy Pages and James Outman, the winner essentially determining how much time Edman will spend between center field and second base.
At full strength, the rotation might not eventually have room for anybody. Not with Clayton Kershaw also expected back. Dodgers general manager Brandon Gomes said Saturday that they’ve been waiting for Kershaw, 36, to get into his throwing program and thus have a better feel for how his body is holding up in the wake of November surgery on his left foot and left knee.
Gomes added that he expects “more conversations at an in-depth level here shortly” with Kershaw. The same can be said about Hernández, though in that case the two sides still have a financial gap to bridge. The timing is worth considering here, too. The Dodgers’ 40-man roster is currently full, and the team doesn’t want to subject anyone on it to waivers. Starting Monday, they can place rehabbing pitchers such as Gavin Stone, River Ryan, Kyle Hurt, Emmet Sheehan and Brusdar Graterol on the 60-day injured list, which opens space on the 40-man roster. Kershaw and Hernández might be added thereafter.
If they are, the roster will feature six MVP Awards, five Cy Youngs, 16 Silver Sluggers, nine Gold Gloves and 45 All-Star appearances.
“Incredible,” Glasnow said. “It’s like ‘The Avengers.'”
5. How will they handle being the villains of MLB?
Betts spoke at DodgerFest last year, near the end of an offseason that saw Ohtani and Yamamoto sign contracts totaling more than $1 billion, and said every game against the 2024 Dodgers would qualify as “the other team’s World Series.” His point was the Dodgers needed to be ready for a season in which basically the entire sport would be aiming for them. He wasn’t wrong.
But what about now?
The Dodgers have since won the World Series and signed practically every player they’ve wanted. Their luxury tax payroll projects to about $380 million, according to Spotrac, roughly $80 million more than the second-place Philadelphia Phillies. The only other teams to even reach $290 million are the New York Mets and Yankees. That doesn’t account for the fact that the Dodgers’ best and most popular player, Ohtani, deferred 97% of his contract. Or that arguably their biggest offseason acquisition, Sasaki, will make the major league minimum this season.
It has all worked to make the Dodgers the proverbial villains of their sport, a reality Roberts believes his team needs to “embrace.”
“Who wouldn’t want to be the focus and do what our organization is doing for the city, the fans?” said Roberts, who is entering the final year of his contract and still looking to sign an extension. “To be quite frank, we draw more than anyone as far as any venue in the world. And so when you’re drawing 4 million fans a year, the way you reciprocate is by investing in players. And that’s what we’ve done.”
Roberts noted that none of the new players the Dodgers brought in have won a championship. Their desire for one, he hopes, will help fuel a team that might otherwise be prone to stagnation. Most of all, it’s the outsized expectations that will help the Dodgers maintain their edge.
Alex Vesia, one of the Dodgers’ primary relievers, believes the heightened pressure will once again bring them closer as a team, a trait that helped them overcome the grind of last October. But that won’t play out until much later, when the games matter and the adversity hits.
At this point, the overwhelming sentiment around the Dodgers is simply gratitude.
“Fans come out here and support us,” Freeman said. “They spend their hard-earned money to come and watch us play. And for them to spend that much money, and for them to see ownership take the product and put it back into the team, it’s awesome. It’s awesome to be a part of that. It’s awesome to be a part of an organization that goes out there, year in and year out, to try and put the best team as possible to go out there and win the championship.”
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