Nick Saban Quotes

Probably the number one position that has the greatest number of players to choose from is receiver. When we're out there recruiting, there are a lot of receivers out there to recruit. It's harder to find defensive players.

Unfortunately, when we had a No. 1 draft pick, there wasn't an Andrew Luck out there. A lot of that's pure luck.

All I wanted to be was a player.

I have no ax to grind. I was lucky. I played. How many guys play high school, college football never play pro football?

In high school, the drama program shifted to musicals, and that's not a skill set I possess, so I let sports be my outlet, and I agreed to play football in college. I was invited to play at the University of Missouri, and I played there for a year, but when all of the talented people are plucked and put in one place, it's scary; it's tough.

You should want to run if you're a player, shouldn't you, on offense?

As a child, I could beat most kids in sprints, but overall, wrestling was the most natural sport for me. In fact, I was a pretty good high school wrestler. I was unusually quick and strong.

People ask me what makes a great skier. It takes the gift; but besides the gift it takes all the availability of mind which permit total control of all the elements that lead to victory. - total composure.

I've always been able to stay focused on trying to recruit good players and trying to develop those players.

The NFL draft is going to be this Thursday. That's a huge night for college players. That's the night they start being paid over the table.

The caliber of play in professional football compared to college is better and everybody knows it. They don't realize how much better. What a giant leap forward in the ability of talent level, the speed, and even the grasp of what you are trying to do. There is no other distractions before the players.

The Rose Bowl is the only bowl I've ever seen that I didn't have to clean.

I wanted to take up a sport the real way and see if I actually had athletic ability. And then I happened to see it was during the Atlanta Olympics. And there was a lot of coverage of archery because the U.S. men's team won all the medals. And I thought, "Wow, that's beautiful. And it's so dramatic, a beautiful sport. And I wonder if I would be good at it?"

It's frustrating in the sense that I still think I could be competing at some sport at a fairly high level, which nobody cares about. Nobody wants to hear me say that.

I wanted to play football and see how that went. In my mind, I knew I wasn't good enough to be a pro, but I was having a really fun time doing it. When you're on a college team, you can tell who's going to be a pro or not almost instantly.

If there is one thing I learned by reading Epstein's "The Sports Gene" it is that world-class athletes are, by definition, abnormal: that is, the kind of person capable of competing at that level is necessarily very different from the rest of us physiologically. They are outliers.

It is an interesting balance in trying to find players to make your team really good and at the same time running a financially sound operation. That is the challenge for every team.

An agent won't help you get drafted higher, won't make you win more games, and won't make you faster or stronger. They all say they can, but the people who do the drafting don't talk to agents. They talk to coaches, they watch film, they talk to the people who've worked with players. They don't talk to agents.

Any coach needs talent. You start with talent. Without talent, we're all in the soup.

You measure a player from the head up.

I got cast playing the best baseball player anybody's ever seen. I don't know how to play any sport, including baseball, but I trained really hard. They had these great coaches, and they started saying, "Wow, you have some like really untapped athletic ability."

But she was already in. Gareth couldn't help but stand back in admiration. Hyacinth Bridgerton was clearly a natural born athlete. Either that or a cat burglar.

Andre Sa is playing close to his potential - maybe even above it.

When I played football, I liked being a goalkeeper or a midfielder. I was probably better at cricket. I would be a very good cricketer if I was a professional now. I think I would probably have been the best, in fact.

I don't worry about playing basketball; that comes natural. I just want to have fun. David Robinson, Patrick Ewing, Michael Jordan: this is like spring break in the ghetto.