New broke that Nick Saban was retiring as head coach of the Alabama football team on Wednesday night, and he broke the silence on Thursday, saying that he would still be around to help the program in this transition.

“I want to be there for the players, the coaches, anything I can do to support them during this transition,” Nick Saban said in his first public comments since retiring, via Chris Low of ESPN. “There are a lot of things to clean up, to help as we move forward. I'm still going to have a presence here at the university in some form and trying to figure out all that and how it works. This is a place that will never be too far away from Miss Terry's and my hearts.”

Saban informed his team that he was retiring in a meeting at 4 p.m. on Wednesday, and it did not last longer than 10 minutes, according to Low. He spoke about how important that was.

“I wanted them to know how much they meant to me,” Saban said, via Low. “It was hard, all of it was. The last few days have been hard. But look, it's kind of like I told the players. I was going to go in there and ask them to get 100 percent committed to coming back and trying to win a championship, but I've always said that I didn't want to ride the program down, and I felt whether it was recruiting or hiring coaches, now that we have people leaving, the same old issue always sort of came up — how long are you going to do this for?”

Uncertainty remains for Alabama football in the program's search for its next head coach, but it appears Saban will be helping out in that search.

Alabama football will be a massively attractive destination for any candidate, so it will be interesting to see who ends up taking the job.