After escaping the Longhorns with a victory, how will Alabama improve going forward?
Nick Saban has been a coach that has praised his players or challenged them to be better. Before facing Louisiana-Monroe on Saturday at Bryant-Denny Stadium, he made an interesting comment during his weekly radio show. Coach Saban loves this Crimson Tide team a lot. He constantly talks about the leadership, he loves how this group has no ‘energy vampires,’ and that players want to do things correctly. Saban likes the character of this unit, but it feels like it is missing one marquee ingredient.
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“I do think we have a good bunch of guys on our team this year,” Saban said Thursday. “We don’t have a lot of guys that don’t want wanna do it right. They work hard. I just think the focus is what’s the challenge that I talk about all the time.”
Competitive fire and toughness seem to be the missing links, especially when the Tide is on the road.
“We used to play better on the road around here than what we played at home because we had some hateful competitors on our team, and when they played on the road, they were mad at 100,000 people, not just the 11 they were playing against,” Saban said.
Alabama’s 2015 and 2016 teams are a perfect example of Saban’s statement. When the Tide took on Georgia in 2015, a fight nearly happened at Sanford Stadium during pregame. Alabama players wanted to rip the heads off Bulldog players and their fans.
Alabama had several rough riders on the 2015 team that hit hard, talked trash, hated losing, and badly wanted to compete.
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The Crimson Tide had players in 2016 that fought teammates if they felt guys were not giving their all. In the season opener against the University of Southern California, Ronnie Harrison and Deionte Thompson got into it. Reuben Foster had to break it up, but fans saw the passion and fire of the 2016 team. Defensively, that was arguably the best team of the Saban era.
Will Anderson and Saban are happy to have any ‘knuckleheads’ on the team, but it is the right kind of knuckleheads that make your team dominant. Players such as Foster, Harrison, Thompson, Jonathan Allen, Ryan Anderson, Tim Williams, Tony Brown, A’Shawn Robinson, Jarran Reed, and Eddie Jackson were not choir boys, but they made everyone respect the Tide on defense.
No one respects or fears Alabama like it used to, and that is concerning Tide fans.
Saban likes this team, but he knows the standard has to be established more.
“I trust in this team,” he said. “I think we’re making progress in that direction. But I also respect the competition and respect what it takes to win vs. the competition that we have. And it starts in this game in terms of us establishing the standard.”
Alabama has to get the fire going before it travels to Arkansas in two weeks.
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Stephen M. Smith is the managing editor and senior writer for Touchdown Alabama Magazine. You can “like” him on Facebook or “follow” him on Twitter, via @CoachingMSmith.
