Alabama held its first official spring practice on Tuesday, and Nick Saban wasted no time getting fed up with the media when he was asked a question he didn’t appreciate.
With former offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin now gone and the way the Crimson Tide blew a late lead in the National Championship Game, there has been speculation that Alabama will be more conservative on offense next season. What are your thoughts on that, coach?
“I don’t know where you came up with where we go to ball control,” Saban said, according to ESPN.com. “That’s not what we do. The New England Patriots threw the ball over 60-something percent of the time, which is more than we threw it. So, where does that assumption come from or do you do what everybody else in the media does — create some s— and throw it on the wall and see what sticks, which is what I see happening everywhere?
Saban mentioned the Patriots because former Bill Belichick assistant Brian Daboll is now the offensive coordinator at Alabama. Saban started by ranting about how his team lost to Clemson because it didn’t execute, not because the approach was overly aggressive.
“We didn’t block them,” he said. “We didn’t execute very well. We didn’t throw the ball accurately when we had open people and a couple of times we dropped it. I think it was more a lack of execution than it was something schematically that we were doing. …
“If we had caught some passes in the national championship game — we had some guys open — we wouldn’t have had to control the ball. We would have scored more touchdowns.”
Although it seemed totally unrelated, Saban also took the opportunity to air his frustrations about the new NCAA rules on satellite camps.
“So we say we don’t want third-parties dealing with players,” he said. “So we’re not going to let the high school coach bring a guy to camp, but some third-party guy can bring him to camp now. Makes no sense at all. But all the people who have common sense, they don’t say anything about it. But the people who scream the loudest will get the thing changed and it’ll mess everything up. That’s the way it goes. The way it goes in the world, politics, just the way it goes.”
The high school camp issue led to a feud between Saban and Jim Harbaugh last year, which you can read more about here.
All of this in his first official press conference of the year? Good to see Saban hasn’t changed much over the offseason. You can see the video from the presser below:
