Nick Saban
Nick Saban
Nicholas Lou Saban Jr. is an American football coach. He is the head football coach at the University of Alabama, a position he has held since the 2007 season. Saban previously served as head coach of the National Football League's Miami Dolphins and three other universities: Louisiana State University, Michigan State University, and the University of Toledo. His eight-year contract totaling US$32 million made him one of the highest paid football coaches, professional or collegiate, in the United States at the...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCoach
Date of Birth31 October 1951
CityFairmont, WV
CountryUnited States of America
Personally, I hate to release any of the guys. I feel like this is our team. These guys have been here. They've worked hard. They've all made a tremendous commitment and sacrifice to trying to make the team. I have a lot of respect for what they've tried to do and feel badly that every guy can't, maybe, realize his dreams.
I would have liked to determine it a month ago or two weeks ago. I would like to determine it. I don't have a problem with determining it. We are trying to determine it. But we don't want to upset the apple cart of what we are trying to accomplish with the development of both of these players by trying to determine something that is not ready to be determined.
My last conversation was awhile back and was really about our heritage, trying to figure out where we came from and what we did,
My focus is on trying to get our players in the best position we can to have an opportunity to be successful. The other stuff is pretty minor.
We need to make sure we have an adequate backup at that position. We're trying to work through that right now, either with the players we have on our team or some who are available in free agency.
The players showed a lot of pride in their part to establish an identity we're trying to form here,
We're trying to get a deal that would satisfy him as well as work for us.
We were recruiting a player who had a coach from another school using the NFL as a negative about our program, ... The player said to him -- and I'm not making this up -- 'If the coach of your school is so good, why aren't they trying to hire him in the NFL?'
It's most important that we use caution right now, in terms of trying to keep some of our better players and more experienced players that have impact and leadership ready for the season,
We have a sense of urgency about trying to get him ready, but we're not going to rush him and put him in a position where it's not going to be something he can have success at.
Would we rather have been in a situation where we didn't have to call timeout by having the best block team that we could on the field? Absolutely, but that wasn't the case, ... I felt that it was an important enough situation in the game, because our guys do a pretty good job inside of getting penetration, to get the right guys in there to do the best job of trying to get the kick blocked.
Reggie had a chance to make a play on the ball, ... In trying to intercept it I think he put himself in a bad position to tackle the guy. It turned out to be a big play.
He did a fantastic job, especially at the end of the game. That's the toughest it ever gets. They're trying to take the air out of him. They're putting them all out there to stop you. He broke two runs that were as big as any in the game.
Sure. I expect it to be ongoing. I guess we could take two approaches which is, make it simple, or we can keep trying to build the way we want to play and get the players to continue practicing it and develop confidence in it and kind of go from there.