Everything Nick Saban Said After the 20-19 Alabama Victory at Texas
The No. 1/1 Alabama football team pulled out a 20-19 victory over Texas Saturday at Darrell K. Royal-Texas Memorial Stadium thanks to a 33-yard field goal by kicker Will Reichard with 10 seconds remaining.
With the win, the Crimson Tide improved to 2-0 on the season while the Longhorns took their first loss at 1-1.
Here's everything Alabama coach Nick Saban said during his postgame press conference:
“The one good thing you have to say about our team is they showed tremendous resiliency today to do the things they needed to do late in the third quarter, fourth quarter, to come back and win the game after not really playing Alabama football for the first three quarters of the game.
"You gotta give Texas a lot of credit. They had a good plan, did a good job of executing it. We made a lot of mental errors. We had way too many penalties. Shoot ourselves in the foot quite a bit. We didn’t run the ball with any consistency on offense when we tried. There was one stretch in the game when we went three-and-out five straight times in the second or third quarter. We had great field position a couple times, couldn’t take advantage of it.
"There's a tremendous amount of things that we could learn from as a team. What I told the team is, ‘If you practice hard, the game is easy. If you don’t push yourself in practice, then the game becomes hard.’ But the resiliency our guys showed to make plays at the end of the game when we needed to make them, they made them.
"You gotta say that’s great from a competitive standpoint. I think it’s great from a team character standpoint. But if we’re gonna be the kind of team that we want to be, that we’re capable of being, we’re gonna have to play better down in and down out.
"As I told the players before the game, this is like playing an SEC game on the road. This kind of atmosphere, this kind of team that we’re playing, Texas has a lot better team than people give them credit for and they’re gonna be in the SEC. And if they were in the SEC right now, they’d probably be in the top half of the league.
"So this was a real test for us, and we didn’t play as well as we’d like to play from beginning to end. But in the end, when we had to make plays, the players did a great job of making the plays they needed to make. So perseverance, resiliency, ability to overcome adversity, we gotta give them an A for all that. But not so good with some of the other execution that we had earlier in the game. We gotta get it fixed, and I think it’s all things that we can get fixed.”
On the crowd noise:
“When you have a false start on offense because the crowd noise is doing ... when you jump offsides on defense, that doesn’t have anything to do with crowd noise. When you block a guy in the back, that doesn’t have anything to do with crowd noise. A lot of them are undisciplined penalties. But we have to be able to play and manage the crowd noise if we’re gonna play in the SEC because every place we play is gonna be like this. So this was nothing new.”
On kicker Will Reichard:
“Will has been a consistent performer for us for several years now. I mean, I’ve never been around a guy that had a perfect season, we actually had a perfect season as a kicker, never missed an extra point, never missed a field goal. Had a game-winner today. I don’t know if that’s his first. But I had total confidence in him. He just did a great job on kickoffs. I think Will Anderson got a piece of the field goal right before the half which turned out to be huge. But Will has done a phenomenal job for us. One of the most consistent performers on our team.”
On Bryce Young's composure:
“I had a lot of confidence in our offense. We went for it and needed an inch, and didn’t get it, which we could have kicked a field goal there and went up by four and made them score a touchdown. If they had scored a touchdown we probably never would have got the ball back. I knew that if we could shrink the game enough that if we got the ball back that he’d do a good job in two-minute. He does it all the time. Players made plays when they had to make them. He made them the drive before that and in that particular drive, and to get us down there when we didn’t make it on fourth down, so three straight drives in a row. He kind of took the game over.”
On the five straight three-and-outs:
“Well, we didn’t block them very well up front. Didn’t protect very well. Got pressure in the pocket. Wasn’t very effective throwing the ball. Didn’t get people open. Probably need to do a better job from a planning standpoint the way they played us. So it all comes down to executing.
"You know, when you play in games like this, you’ve gotta focus on what’s in front of you. You can’t worry about all the other stuff that’s going on, what people say, what they say on ESPN, what you all say, how much you’re favored in the game. You’ve gotta focus on what’s in front of you.
"If you’re an offensive lineman, that’s the guy you have to block. If you’re a receiver, that’s the guy you’ve gotta to beat. If you’re a quarterback, you’ve gotta take what the defense gives you. If you’re a runner, you’ve got to press the hole and make the right cuts. We didn’t do any of that stuff the way we need to. So it wasn’t just one thing. But you’ve gotta be able to stay focused on that, and you can’t put yourself behind the eight ball. You get in so many second-and-long and third-and-longs that you’re at a real disadvantage to yourself. So we’ve gotta do a better job of all those downs so we don’t put ourselves in those situations.”
On Terrion Arnold:
“I thought he played much better. We’ve got a lot of competition at corner, so we kind of go by who played the best. We started Khyree [Jackson], he got beat a couple times. I’ve got confidence in all of them, but when Terrion went into the game, I thought he did a really good job. He made a couple really nice plays.”
On Will Anderson Jr.
“He got a couple penalties, but other than that, he played really well and he made a big play at the end of the game when he got the sack. It didn’t take them out of field goal range, but it made for a much more difficult kick. But I thought Will played well in the game.”
On what makes Young so good, especially in the two-minute offense:
“Why is he so good? If I could actually tell you that [laughter], I don’t know if I’d be doing this. And this is a pretty good job I’ve got, but I’d have a better one.
“No, the guy studies. He prepares well for the game. He understands exactly what the defense is in and what they’re gonna do. He understands protections. He knows how to protect himself. Knows when he’s gotta throw the ball hot. He’s athletic enough to extend plays and make plays. And he’s accurate throwing the ball. And he’s very, very instinctive. I mean, he plays quarterback like a point guard in basketball.
"He’s got talent, but he just doesn’t just play with his talent. He’s very well-prepared and knows exactly what the game plan is and what he needs to do to execute it. Players around him gotta play well, too. Quarterback is a hard position to play when the players around you don’t play well.”
How Quinn Ewers' injury affected the game:
“I really don’t know. I thought the quarterback that went out of the game was playing really well, made some really good throws early in the game. He’s a very talented guy. But I thought the quarterback that came in the game did a really good job, too. He scrambled and extended some plays that maybe the other guy wouldn’t have been able to in critical situations because he is very athletic.
"But our guys played better as the game went on. We played better in the second half on defense, I thought. We pressured and affected the quarterback a little more. They do a lot of shifting and motioning and adjusting, and we messed a couple those things up early in the game. I think sometimes that messes with a guys' confidence, and once we settled down, I thought we played a little bit better.”
On the importance of special teams in close games:
“They can be extremely important. Field position got flipped in the second half all because of the kicking game. They got the ball, we stopped them. Their punter punts the ball about 60 yards. We go three-and-out. Our guy punts it 35 yards. We stop them, they punt it and it’s on the 1-yard line. People don’t talk about that, but that’s how special teams affects the game and it affects field position. Every 100 yards of field position in the game means six points most of the time. So it’s critical, and that’s why your specialists have to execute and your teams have to do a great job of controlling vertical field position by the way they play. And I thought teams did a pretty good job today, but we’ve just gotta be more consistent with the specialists.”
