Nick Saban spent 50 years chasing wins, and even sitting in traffic felt like a competition. After seven national championships and decades of putting football first, the former Alabama coach is finally learning to slow down. But his success came with sacrifices, especially for his family.
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Now, ESPN’s documentary is bringing those sacrifices into focus, and the response has left his daughter, Kristen Saban, overwhelmed. The six-part series has become the third most-watched ESPN Original debut of all time.
Kristen shared an Instagram story captioned “Still Not Over It,” highlighting the documentary’s impressive numbers. Saban averaged 529,000 viewers for its debut, while related videos generated 110 million views across ESPN’s social platforms and 6.7 million social engagements.
Produced by Words + Pictures and directed by Russell Dinallo, Saban premiered on October 8, with all six episodes available on the ESPN app. It revisits his 17 seasons at Alabama, where he won six national championships, along with his coaching stints at Michigan State, LSU, and the Miami Dolphins.
More than 70 people were interviewed, including Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Kirby Smart, Lane Kiffin, Steve Sarkisian, Bill Belichick, and Tim Tebow. For Kristen, however, the series offered a perspective on her father’s career that she had not fully understood growing up.
After watching the finished documentary in late September, she shared her emotional reaction on Instagram.
“I cried. I laughed,” Kristen wrote. “I remembered things I had forgotten and understood things I was probably too young to understand at the time. When it ended, I just sat there in complete awe, sobbing from immense happiness and some grief.”
She described the series as “about so much more than football,” highlighting its focus on relationships, discipline, and family. “I’ve spent my entire life watching him pour his heart into everything he does, but to see his story told on the big screen and witness the love, admiration and respect that filled that room was truly overwhelming,” she wrote.
During an appearance on Theo Von’s show, Saban admitted that he missed parts of his children’s childhood and did not want to make the same mistake with his grandchildren. The documentary also revealed how Miss Terry maintained family connections by setting aside Sundays at 5 p.m. for coaches to stop working and have dinner with their children.
As Matt Baker of The Athletic reported, Terry acknowledged midway through the series that “the whole family has to buy in that Daddy’s job comes first.” While Saban’s championships defined his coaching legacy, Kristen’s reflections reveal how differently that journey looked from inside his own home.