While Alabama might have taken a little longer to get on track this season than coach Nick Saban would have preferred, he said Thursday his patience wasn’t necessarily tested.
“I don’t have any patience, so anything that happens is a test of my patience, including sitting in this chair right now,” Saban joked during his final news conference on the eve of the College Football Playoff semifinal matchup against Cincinnati in the Goodyear Cotton Bowl Classic.
The Crimson Tide saved what was easily their best game of the season for the SEC championship game in a 41-24 thumping of then No. 1-ranked and favored Georgia. That’s after earlier in the season suffering their first loss to an unranked team (Texas A&M) since Saban’s first year in 2007, squeaking past a depleted LSU team by a touchdown and driving 97 yards in the final 1:32 of regulation to tie the game and win 24-22 in four overtimes against an Auburn team that had lost three straight was playing its backup quarterback.
“I think it’s always challenging when you’re coming off winning a championship for players to have the same hunger and sense of urgency to prove something,” said Saban, whose Crimson Tide went 13-0 a year ago to win their fifth national title in the last 10 years. “I think that is sort of a part of the human condition, that when you have success you want to be rewarded, you want to relax and can be a little complacent, so I don’t think it was unusual from that standpoint.
“We sort of anticipate that when we have a successful season and are coming off a successful season, but because we were young, it took this team a little longer to maybe respond on a consistent basis like we wanted them to.”
Alabama, a 13½-point favorite against Cincinnati, had 10 players from the 2020 team taken in the NFL draft, including eight in the first two rounds.
“You’ve heard me say before it’s what you choose to ignore sometimes that’s just as important to being successful as what you choose to buy into and…
Source : espn
