TUSCALOOSA, Alabama — Nick Saban met with reporters today for his regular Monday news conference, discussing the loss to Texas A&M and what’s wrong with his Alabama football team. Here are the highlights:
–Opening comment: No matter how you cut the mustard, whether we won both of the last two games or lost both of the last two games, I don’t think we’ve executed as well as a football team. If we don’t focus as well, plan as well, practice as well, rest as well, get emotionally ready as well, for whatever reasons, I think that the focus has to be on not what has been lost, but what can be gained from the lessons learned from those circumstances and situations. We need to look forward in a positive way to what we want this football team to be, be remembered as, accomplish. There are a lot of things moving forward that we can accomplish.
Nick Saban at today’s news conference. (Copyright photo by Brett Hudson)
“I know the questions are, why didn’t you do this, why didn’t you do that, why did we call this play, why didn’t we call that play. But it still goes back to why are we even in that situation relative to how we played the rest of the game. Why are we in the situation that we don’t really respond as a team emotionally with any aggressiveness or energy level until we get behind 20-0? All those are questions I’m certainly responsible for. I’m not trying to say that. But for whatever reasons, we have an opportunity now to prove that we are and can be a good football team. That’s what we want to focus on, that’s all we want to talk about, is we’re looking forward. The only thing we can gain from the past is lessons learned for all of us, in terms of what we can do better, what we need to do better, and what everybody’s got to make a commitment to in terms of trying to do better. And accomplish something significant with what’s left of this season, with this team.”
–Injury update: “The only real injury that we have is John Fulton has turf toe, a pretty good one. And he actually finished the game with it. It really swelled up quite a bit and all that. He may be very questionable for this particular game.”
–On the focus this week: I don’t think that we need to be worried about who we’re playing this week as much as we need to worry about how we’re playing. I think that’s the focus. We have a lot of respect for every team we play, and certainly Western Carolina has done a lot of good things this season. They score a lot of points. But I think the focus for us needs to be on what we’re doing, how we’re playing. That’s the approach that I’d like to take with our coaches, our players, and everybody in the organization.”
–On T.J. Yeldon’s fumbles in the last two games: “It comes down to the same thing – carrying the ball correctly. In one case you didn’t get the handoff correctly, in the other case he was carrying the ball kind of low in his belly and got popped. Confidence should come in doing it correctly. We have every faith, trust and confidence in him that when he does it correctly he’s not going to fumble.”
–On playing better on the road than at home: “I really don’t know. I really don’t know the answer to that question. I don’t know if it’s the challenge, the focus, the players can be more serious because they’re a little more confined. I really don’t know, but the last two games we played, one at home, one on the road, and I’d put both those in the same category — we didn’t play well as a team. You guys don’t think so because we won one and lost the other one.
“If we’d won this one, you wouldn’t be concerned, either. I was concerned then. But you all live in the results world, we kind of live in the process world. It’s hard to get people to respond. It’s kind of the Bluegrass Miracle phenomenon. You play bad, you win the game, then the next week you get your ass kicked because nobody responded to playing bad. Because you won on the Bluegrass Miracle.”
–On the Tide seniors: “This has been a really good group of guys. Not a big group. Obviously some of the guys – it would be a lot bigger group if everybody had stayed in school and we didn’t lose some guys to the draft and different things – some guys have been redshirted. A lot of things affect class sizes. This group has been a very good group, a very productive group, and certainly has been a bunch of guys that bought into the program and done everything you could ask for personally, academically and athletically. We’re really proud of not only the way this group has performed on the field, but how they represented the institution and the program as well.”
–On the missed tackles: “We’ve had more missed tackles, more yards after catch, after contact, the first missed tackle, especially on space plays. That’s one thing we’ve always been is a really good tackling team with a good tackling secondary. That is something that we need to improve on.”
–On AJ McCarron: “I just think that as a quarterback, you’re always going to get a little more credit than you deserve when things go well, and maybe a little more of the blame when things don’t go well. But I do think that the kind of competitor AJ is, my expectation would be that he takes the bull by the horns, learns the lessons he’s learned in the last two games and tries to work on improving. I don’t think there’s any reason to say that he’s reached a plateau. I think he needs to break through and continue to improve and not be satisfied where he is, and get the players around him to help him do that. That would be my approach with him, relative to what he needs to do to actually play better, take the bull by the horns and say ‘What is this team, what is this offense going to be remembered for in terms of how we play?’
–On John Fulton playing a lot against Texas A&M: “What we did was, in the last game, was … Vinnie (Sunseri) usually plays fifth defensive back, and Nick Perry had a bad shoulder, (and) Vinnie also can play the sixth defensive back. So with the no-huddle situation as it was in the game, we played Dee Milliner at Star, John at corner in his place, and then Vinnie was always the sixth defensive back, and he was in there 70 percent of the time. But we didn’t feel like we could play nickel one way and dime another. So that’s how John ended up playing. John has played well when he’s had the opportunity to play, so we thought he deserved a chance to play. And because of some injuries to some other guys, we made some of those changes. John did, he’s player of the week, he did a good job.”
–On the defensive line rotation: “We played a little different in the last game. We tried to get four guys in the last game that were athletic enough to be defensive tackles. We actually took [Adrian] Hubbard and Xzavier Dickson and Denzel [Devall], we played Ed [Stinson] inside, and we tried to get where we had four defensive ends and four inside guys that were the most athletic guys that could do their job because of the quarterback. In terms of being able to have a chance to get him on the ground or be able to pass rush a little more athletically or have a little more balanced pass rush. That was a little different in that particular game and I don’t think it’s something that we will do all the time. It’s just that circumstance and that’s the way we practiced all week. Jesse [Williams] was able to play inside because he is pretty athletic and runs pretty well. Some of the other big guys that we have, [Jeoffrey] Pagan was the other guy that played outside, we didn’t see an opportunity to play those guys much unless they were in four of five wideouts.”
–On what he could have done better in preparation for the Texas A&M game: “I think there are a lot of things, I think there are a lot of things that we all can do. I think that we internally try to do those things. I think every player has things that he would have liked to do better. Obviously when we don’t play well, that means did you plan well enough, did you practice well enough, did you practice the things you ended up playing? Were the players prepared? Were they emotionally ready to play the game? All those types of things get analyzed — not only from a big picture stand point, but also from a group standpoint and individually. With every player in the organization and every coach, when you don’t play well obviously you need to do all those things a little bit better at every level — from me right down to the players. That’s what we try to analyze and that’s what we try to do. Take an example of tackling. We really tried to emphasize tackling last week and we still had more missed tackles than we would like. There are physical things and there are emotional things. You can make excuses and say, ‘Well the team was emotionally tired so they weren’t quite focusing like they needed to do.’ They played a heck of a lot better when they got down 20-0. Everybody all of the sudden got emotionally better. So why couldn’t it have been better at the start? That’s the questions I ask myself.”
–On the lack of effective pass rush: “I don’t necessarily think that’s accurate. I don’t think that we have a dominant rusher like we had a year ago. I think we have guys that as a unit and as a group can be effective. I think it’s a combination of not rushing on a consistent basis and not covering on a consistent basis that has been one of the problems that we have had. The last two weeks again, lots of issues of not being able to get off the field on third down. That hasn’t been a real factor all year-long, but in the last two weeks I mean, we gave up 14 points in the second half at LSU going 0-7 on third downs during that time, and we started this game 0-7 on third downs and got behind because of it. When you create those situations you have to get off the field. It’s not just the pass rush, it contributes to it to some degree sometimes. It’s also the discipline of everybody doing what they are supposed to do in rush as well as coverage. When we pressure, people have to do what they are supposed to do. To me I would say it’s more of a team thing than it is any specific group problem.”
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