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It’s always a little bit different when University of Alabama coach Nick Saban heads back to LSU, where he was the head coach from 2000-04.
Saturday night (8 p.m. ET, CBS), the No. 4 Crimson Tide will return to Tiger Stadium for another showdown with the SEC West rival, which is also faced in the BCS National Championship Game at the end of the 2011 season.
Saban talked about that and some other things during his press conference Monday:
“Obviously we’re looking forward to having a great week of preparation after a bye week. Our goals were to get our players more ready to play for 60 minutes in the game, be more disciplined in the way we play for 60 minutes in the game. Get everybody committed to the role that they have. I certainly think they made progress toward that. Having a few days off, hopefully we’re rested and got some guys healthier and we can have a great week of preparation this week for LSU.
“These games are traditionally very tough, physical games between two ranked teams. It’s certainly not going to be any different this year. They have a very, very good team that’s playing its best football of the year the last three games.
“They have an excellent running game, very good offensive line, very good running backs. Their defense has been outstanding. One of the most difficult teams to score on. No. 1 pass efficiency defense in the country. They’re always ball-hawking, create a lot of turnovers. Ball security is always an issue when we play against these guys. They’re outstanding on special teams and have very good specialists.
“This is a team that has really good players, is really well coached. They do a great job. Les (Miles) has done a great job there. This is going to be a very challenging game for us as a team. I think, relative the circumstances that we’re in, that we should have an expectation to get everyone’s best every day for what we have a chance to accomplish and what we have a chance to do. Playing these games one game at a time, and this is the most important game because this is the game that we play this week against a very good team on the road in a difficult place to play.”
On what’s different about night games at Tiger Stadium:
“I think the crowd’s always going to be very involved in the game. I think there’s a difference being involved in the game and how committed you are to playing well and how you let that affect you. I can guarantee that their crowd’s going to be very involved in the game, whether you play in the day or at night. They have great fans like we have great fans when we play at home. I think the focus that our players have to have and the expectation of what it takes to communicate _ we’ve had some experience with that now on the road. Hopefully this is not going to be something that their involvement is going to have any affect on our commitment to what we want to try to accomplish.”
On LSU’s secondary:
“They play a lot of man to man and they’ve got very good players. They’re very athletic. They’ve got nice-sized corners. They like to pressure. The combination of pressure and the man to man has affected people’s ability to have any kind of efficiency in the passing game. Obviously it’s going to be important for us to be able to do that, because I don’t think you can be one-dimensional against them because they’re capable and playing well against the run, too, especially when they start stunting and loading the box on you. You’ve got to be able to have balance and the players have got to do a good job of executing.”
On LSU’s recent big-play potential:
“I think that because they have a very good offensive line and very good backs … when you can run the ball as effectively as they have in the last three games that they’ve played, people load the box on them. So you’re playing less guys in coverage. They’ve got some really capable receivers. I think the quarterback has done a nice job for them. He’s kind of a dual-threat guy who can run a little bit. He’s a very accurate passer who makes good decisions. They’ve got some receivers who, even though they may be a little bit young, they’re certainly capable of making big plays. I think when they run the ball effectively against you, you’re a little bit more susceptible to that. The secondary has to do a really good job and play with a lot of discipline and stay in really good coverage position.”
On the value of the bye week:
“Well, I think sometimes bye weeks are good and sometimes they don’t work out so well. I think a little bit of it is mindset of your players in terms of how they look at it, what they want to get out of it, how they want to improve what their mindset is toward that. And then when you come back off the bye week, you reestablish the sort of mental focus, intensity, whatever you want to call it, to get back into game-week mode, beast mode, whatever you want to call it, which is kind of what you need to do. I think our team has gone through one bye week already and we didn’t play our best coming off of that game, so hopefully we learned a lot from that. We certainly practiced a lot better last week one this bye week than the one before, and hopefully it’ll carry over into preparation for this one. It does give us a little bit of extra time to recruit, which is certainly good for the program, and I think our coaches did a good job taking advantage of that.”
On LSU’s quarterback situation:
“I think the way they played the last three games — they’ve kind of not put the game in the quarterback’s hands as much, because they’ve said, ‘OK, we’ve got a good offensive line, we’ve got really good running backs, so we’re going to run the football and establish the run. And you’re going to have to stop us. And then we’re going to use play-action passes to try to make explosive plays down the field,’ which has been very effective for them. And the quarterback has actually played better and played very well for them. They’ve minimized what he has to do in the game. And what he has been asked to do he has done extremely well. So this has made them a very effective team.”
On what he did during the bye, watch games?
“I watched LSU games. But I did watch some games, I flipped around a little bit and watched Florida-Georgia, I watched some of West Virginia and TCU going back and forth, I did watch some of Auburn and Ole Miss, which was a great football game. So I did watch some. Miss Terry kind of runs the TV, so if she wants to watch it, I get to watch, you know, Gone With The Wind or something else.”
Christopher Walsh has covered Alabama football since 2004 and is the author of 19 books. In his free time, he writes about college football.
