Nick Saban's daughter shuts down unretirement rumors: 'You had your time'

McElroy acknowledged he did not believe it was true.

Days later, Saban's daughter, Kristen, posted on her Instagram story a photo of her dad walking onto the field, captioning it, "Damn, I miss this."

With the timing, fans thought it was a foreshadowing of a huge announcement.

It was not.

"My wife even said to me - we have all the recruits over on Sunday with their parents for breakfast. She would always meet with the mothers and talk about how she was going to help impact their sons and how they would be well taken care of. She came to me right before I retired and said, 'Why are we doing this?' I said, 'What do you mean?' She said, 'All they care about is how much you're going to pay them. They don't care about how you're going to develop them, which is what we've always done. So why are you doing this?'

"To me, that was sort of a red alert that we really are creating a circumstance here that is not beneficial to the young people, which is why I always did what I did. My dad did it, I did it. So, that's the reason I always like college athletics more than the NFL, because you had the opportunity to develop young people."

Saban has since joined ESPN's "College GameDay" and has fought on Capitol Hill for regulating name, image and likeness (NIL) deals.

He won seven national championships, the most ever by a head college football coach - one with LSU and six in Tuscaloosa.

Fox News' Scott Thompson contributed to this report.