For seventy-five years, Nick Saban has shared his birthday with roughly thirty-five million costumed American children, and he has never once filed a complaint, because there is no precedent, anywhere, for Nick Saban filing a complaint about a schedule he did not choose.

Today the man retired from coaching — but not, as it turns out, from being scheduled — turns 75. He will spend the actual date on the road with ESPN’s College GameDay in Bloomington, Indiana, where the family celebrated early, because of the broadcast.

That is the whole story, and it is a great story. Retirement freed Saban from the SEC. It did not free his Saturday. The program that once dissected his teams now dissects his teams’ successors from 9 a.m. to noon, and it has booked a birthday tribute into the show, because the show owns Saturday morning and has always owned it, and it graciously allows him to be 75 inside its runtime.

His daughter Kristen posted a look at the early celebration this week — cake, family, the works — captioned, with the loyalty of a child who has watched the same man run every household calendar since 1951, as a “family of talented in-sync singers.” The caption did not need context. Everyone in Fairfield County gave it one anyway.

“He told us the party started when he sat down,” said Buddy Arcuri, 74, of Fairfield, Massachusetts, who played against Saban in a 1963 youth league and has attended the same argument ever since. “He’s been first one there ever since. The man showed up early to his own retirement.”

The tribute itself will unfold as all broadcast tributes do — montage, hush, a former player wiping his eye, a montage of montages — while Saban, who has been praised and eviscerated on that program’s air in roughly equal professional quantities, will accept it the way he accepted everything: sitting upright, taking the card, noting one correction about the tape.

Halloween itself will be present, as it has been for every one of the seventy-five birthdays, in the form of pumpkins the broadcast will cut around and staff costumes it will cut around and one executive somewhere who thought hard about a Halloween sweater before deciding against it.

There is a version of this where the family gets the actual date, a table, a cake, and no cameras. That version is scheduled for Sunday, and it will be lovely, and the man at its center will check his phone once for the Indiana depth chart, because he is who the schedule made, and the schedule made him first.

The show tapes at 9 a.m. Eastern. The cupcake, the family assures everyone, held up.