Nick Saban spoke for about four minutes straight, uninterrupted.
He was sitting at Baumhower’s Victory Grille for his weekly radio show when a caller asked how Saban gets the team to tune out the noise of Alabama being expected to win by significant margins.
“For example,” the caller said, “with Arkansas, we were supposed to blow them out and then you don’t do it, and it was because you have created such a game atmosphere that we go to the games knowing we’re going to win. We just don’t know by how much.”
Then Saban began to respond.
“I’ll tell you what, I’m glad you go to the game that way because I don’t ever go to the game that way,” Saban said. “I have too much respect for the other team, been in too many games, whether we won when we weren’t expected to win or the other team beat us.”
Rat poison, Saban said, is always going to be created by the media and that the reality of the world isn’t based on what can be read on the internet, what somebody thinks or what the line is for a game.
“The biggest one is, every time a team loses two games, everybody says that team is like done,” Saban said. “It’s really just the opposite.”
He referenced how Texas A&M had just lost two games before defeating Alabama, and those two losses made the Aggies dangerous. The same, Saban said, can be said about LSU and how many thought Alabama would blow the Tigers out because they’re “not good anymore.”
“They’re competitors,” Saban said. “They have moms and dads. They have pride in…
