I guess I’m motivated by the fear of failure to some degree and knowing what can happen when you don’t do things the way you need to do them to have success. – Nick Saban
Teachers are always trying to inspire people to do better, to learn, to grow. That’s what we do, and we’re proud of the success we’ve had here doing that, and it’s something we’ll certainly continue to do. – Nick Saban
I think when you win the national championship, it works throughout your team. Where human nature is to say, I did well. I got my quota this month. Now do I get some time off? Do I get a bonus? Do I get to go on a cruise? But it’s not to keep trying to be the best. That’s not necessarily human nature. – Nick Saban
I think people who grow up in one particular environment, like the Alabama-Auburn game, they don’t ever get the same appreciation for the Ohio State-Michigan game or the Michigan State-Notre Dame game or the Michigan-Michigan State game, the Browns and the Steelers. – Nick Saban
If I say I like one person, that means everybody that voted for the other person doesn’t like me. So, why would I do that? – Nick Saban
It’s been our goal as a program to always give our players the best opportunity to be successful, whether it’s personally, academically, or athletically. – Nick Saban
I don’t know if I’m different from everybody else, but there’s really only two things to me that are really, really important – recruiting good players in the program and developing those players once they get here. – Nick Saban
I don’t want people to think I’m not happy when we win – I am. But there’s a difference between being happy for the feeling of accomplishing something and being overjoyed and feeling, ‘This is it – we conquered the world.’ We didn’t. We just won a game. – Nick Saban
Now, everybody always says there’s no ‘I’ in team, but there is an ‘I’ in win, because the individuals make the team what it is, and how they think and what they do is important to the team. So when you act like the individual is not important, well, it is damn important who these people are and what they are. – Nick Saban
I don’t try to sensationalize anybody. I’m not trying to entertain. I’m trying to give information and give access to me and tell about our program. – Nick Saban
George Perles at Michigan State was the first coach that gave me responsibility as far as being a coordinator. I learned a lot from that experience. – Nick Saban
One thing I always tell players is that there are three bad things: Nothing good happens after midnight, nothing good happens when you’re around guns unless you’re going hunting, and you don’t want to mess around with women that you don’t know because a lot of times, bad things happen. – Nick Saban
We create a standard for how we want to do things, and everybody’s got to buy into that standard or you really can’t have any team chemistry. – Nick Saban
There’s two parts of leadership. You’ve got to be a good leader – you’ve got to be somebody that people want to emulate and care about the other people. But the other guys that you have have to accept their leadership. They have to respond to it. That’s the chemistry that you never know how that is going to happen. – Nick Saban
