TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Certain news events can seem to hover for hours and then days, as if they tinker with the tenor of a town and leave the sidewalks blanketed with some sort of wordless gloom. That kind of feeling had settled over here by midday on the day after as a place of rowdy fall Saturdays had come across a hushed winter Thursday, and Tuscaloosa took on something akin to a pall. The sun did rise and shine, for the record.
The retirement of 17-season football coach Nick Saban, which one student said he learned “at right about 4:13 [p.m.]” Wednesday, cascaded beyond the departure of a surpassing leader with seven national championships (six at Alabama), three national runner-up finishes, eight College Football Playoff berths, 11 SEC titles (nine with the Crimson Tide). It pinpointed again a 72-year-old West Virginian turned forever Alabamian as a cultural touchstone, a pillar of a community, a fountain from which so much fun flowed and an emblem of the intensive meaning of football.
“Also, it’s kind of like a historical feeling, you know,” said Caleb Messerly, a 21-year-old senior from St. Louis.
The eras had shifted. The shift had wreaked a where-were-you aspect. One drove back from her South Carolina hometown. One paused from playing “Madden” to check Instagram. One learned from a boyfriend and Mississippi State student on Snapchat. One learned from a friend in Missouri. One sat in a hallway outside a business class. At the makeshift gathering by the Saban statue beside Bryant-Denny Stadium, it was possible to overhear one say he had gone to the doctor and had a needle in his arm. One woke from a nap to texts from her mother and grandmother. One was walking to his class.
All reported the same reaction: No, that’s not true. “There’s no way it’s real,” said Brady Wallace, 19, a freshman from Hagerstown, Md. “It’s like a weird dream we’re all in.”
Yes, Saban’s announcement had done no less than reiterate a curious aspect of the human condition: It’s possible to know for years that something will happen someday yet still feel stunned when the someday arrives. “I honestly never thought it would come,” said John Cipriano, 18, a freshman from Birmingham, “and now that I’m living in the moment, it’s still shocking, heartbreaking, I guess, because he’s the only coach I’ve ever known.”
All eras do end, it seems — even the Saban era at Alabama, of all seemingly eternal phenomena. To anyone who has driven Interstate 20/59 west from Birmingham or Atlanta umpteen times or to those even much more familiar, Saban had come to seem a topographical formation as he took the faded kingdom and shook it to a shine both retro and fresh.
On the 28-minute flight from Atlanta to Birmingham, always good for an utterance of “Roll Tide” or two, a woman boarded, saw the man with the “A” jacket in Row 10 and said as she passed, “Roll Tide, and we’ll be fine.” On the radio along the highway — WJOX 94.5, per custom — a caller named Ernest spoke of the “bittersweet day,” the tangle of feelings containing the bitter (obvious) and the sweet (gratefulness) plus something unfamiliar: the fear of the unknown. The hunt for a replacement was underway, and it’s a doozy, so watch out for misinformation from somebody’s cousin’s barber’s dentist or whatnot.
A poll by the radio show “3 Man Front” found Oregon’s Dan Lanning as front-runner (before he reaffirmed his commitment to the Ducks later Thursday), and an ad a host read for a roofing company began cleverly with, “For some of you, it might seem like the sky is falling . . .” Writer John Talty, having penned a book about Saban’s leadership principles among much else, appeared as a guest and said the prudent words nobody says during these doozy searches: “I want to be careful what I say.” The show echoed reports that Saban had told the team Wednesday that the replacement would arrive before week’s end, and that he had gone to the office per habit Thursday morning.
Along the Strip, a central nervous system of campus and town, David M. Jones, 75, spoke from the Bamastuff shop his father started in 1942 and in which his daughter Tracey and son David also work. Jones told of Saban and wife Terry’s effect on the city, from the Habitat for Humanity homes to the new science, arts and math center, to their bond-strengthening help after the 2011 tornado, and he told of “sadness and gratefulness and just knowing that change is inevitable.” He said: “He has made my life different because I sell souvenirs, and if he’s successful then we sell more souvenirs. He has improved my lifestyle since he’s been here, and I’ll always be grateful.”
After all, Alabama had an enrollment boom that football fueled, and so Jones cracked, “I wish we had 37,000 [students] back when we sold textbooks.”
Down the sidewalk, around the bend and into Bryant-Denny’s front yard, the statues of coaches and their national titles begin, all the way to the one that just became a shrine. There’s coach Wallace Wade (1925, 1926, 1930), then coach Frank Thomas (1934, 1941), then a certain coach Paul W. Bryant (1961, 1964, 1965, 1973, 1978, 1979), then coach Gene Stallings (1992), then Saban (2009, 2011, 2012, 2015, 2017, 2020). Around Saban’s feet, a mass of knickknacks and such had formed, from the eight or more boxes of Little Debbie’s Oatmeal Creme Pies (a favorite of his), to a small skyline of plastic Coca-Cola bottles (still full), to pompoms and flowers and a crown hanging off Saban’s right arm, to posters reading GOAT and LONG LIVE THE KING and WELL DONE COACH.
As a steady stream of students and occasional others stopped by, the hush felt curious.
“Especially as you get closer to the statue, it all kind of quiets down,” said Ben Martin, 20, a junior from Clanton, Ala.
“Like a funeral,” said his friend Zachary Michaels, 20, a junior from the Chicago suburb of Crystal Lake, Ill., the third brother in his family to attend Alabama and rather an example of the school’s reach that owes something to Saban.
“It’s definitely respect,” Martin said.
“Heartbroken,” their friend Messerly said. “I understand it. He can’t give anything else. He’s given it everything.”
Wallace, from Hagerstown, and Cipriano, from Birmingham, walked up with brown shopping bags from nearby Publix, ready to place their Little Debbie’s and their Coke bottles amid the living art installation at Saban’s sculptured feet. Soon Alabama’s elephant mascot appeared, riding a golf cart blaring music from across the way, coming by to hug Saban’s leg and initiating group hugs, one of which soon welcomed 12 people. Just walking about, it was possible to hear things such as, “I feel like the stadium won’t be the same” (as a young student told WHNT-TV of Huntsville), or, “It’s a day of mourning” such that classes, in their second day since winter break, ought to get the kibosh for a bit.
“It definitely feels a little gloomy today,” said Molly Davis, from Collierville, Tenn., who, like Wallace and Cipriano, got the harsh roulette wheel of having this happen smack during their freshman year.
Alyssa McGhee and Caroline Bowman had triumphed in that lottery. They are both 21-year-old seniors, from Columbia, S.C., and Louisville, respectively, and they’re grateful, and their college days have filled with batches of games, an integral part of their life here. “I did almost wreck my car” when the news came, McGhee said, “probably toward the end of Georgia,” on the drive from Columbia after the week’s storm delayed her return.
“We’ve all been saying it kind of feels like he died even though he’s still here,” McGhee said, “but we’re still mourning the loss.”
“The loss,” Bowman said, “of a great coach” — and all that a great coach entails.