Nick Saban knew what these Alabama players needed most this year: His belief in them

LOS ANGELES — In the middle of September, being a member of Alabama’s football team didn’t seem like a lot of fun. The Crimson Tide had just lost decisively to Texas. Several former players were complaining on social media, questioning the toughness of this group and whether this generation understood what it meant to play for Alabama. The fan base was apoplectic, wondering whether Nick Saban’s decline had finally arrived. 

And then, somehow, things got even worse. The next week, Alabama struggled through an ugly 17-3 win at South Florida with quarterback Jalen Milroe benched and no obvious answers to its sputtering offense. It was arguably the worst Alabama had looked since Saban’s first year in 2007.

But when Saban came in for his postgame press conference, he set a surprising tone. He didn’t rant. He didn’t get impatient. He didn’t threaten to take away anyone’s starting jobs or run his team into the ground the next week as punishment for another sub-standard performance. 

Instead, he kept coming back time and again to one theme: How proud he was that they won the game. 

“A lot of guys played really well,” he said. “I want our players to be happy about the fact they won.”

Sorry, but was this the same guy who spent his entire career demanding perfection — or close to it — from everyone around him? The same guy who won six national titles in his first 14 years at Alabama because he held his organization to its own standard that often had nothing to do with the scoreboard? 

Was Saban getting soft in his 70s? Was he losing his fastball? Or did he know something that nobody else could see?

“He’s got an uncanny ability to know what each team needs, each group of guys needs, each side of the ball needs,” said Alabama defensive coordinator Kevin Steele. “He’s just got a gift there.”

Steele said this Friday, with the Crimson Tide about 77 hours away from playing No. 1 Michigan in the College Football Playoff semifinals, and if it were anyone but Bama, it would seem completely surreal.

This is the team that got wrecked by Texas, that barely hung on against Texas A&M and Arkansas, that needed a miracle fourth-and-31 touchdown just to survive against an Auburn team that had lost to New Mexico State one week earlier. We have seen lots of Alabama football under Saban, and this wasn’t it — until it was in the SEC championship game with a brilliant 27-24 victory over Georgia that catapulted this team into the CFP, albeit controversially, over 13-0 Florida State. 

“I think I couldn’t be prouder of a bunch of guys on a team that has come so far from where we were,” Saban said after that game. “I think this is a great example for a lot of people who want to be successful in terms of the perseverance these guys showed, the character they had to overcome adversity and the resilience they played with.”

A large segment of college football fans will hear those words and roll their eyes. Alabama? Adversity? This isn’t East Podunk State.

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Even at its worst, Alabama is still among the three most talented teams in the country every year, deploying more resources and brainpower than anyone in pursuit of national championships. If something is wrong at Alabama, it’s either because Saban didn’t recruit the right players or didn’t hire the right assistants. There’s never a reason to break out the violins for these guys. 

But whether the expectations are being met or not, there’s always a process -- and, more importantly, a reason why Saban does what he does and says what he says.

Saban stood up for his players amid criticism

Over the course of his career, he's been a master at using the media to send messages to his team. When he starts moving his hands like a symphony conductor or erupts at a reporter or chastises fans for not taking the Charleston Southern game seriously enough, what he’s really doing is making a coaching point that he hopes will be implanted in the minds of all his players. 

And as Alabama stands on the precipice of arguably the greatest in-season turnaround in Saban’s career, the message he’s been sending for months has been notable.

After hearing all season from fans, former players and pundits that this team wasn’t good enough to win a national championship, Saban was steadfast in making sure they heard something different from him: Yes, you are. 

“Just being on a team and hearing how the head coach — especially a head coach like Nick Saban — is still talking good and still having faith and still having confidence within us as a team is very important,” said cornerback Kool-Aid McKinstry. “I feel like that did play a big role into why we’re here today.”

Emotional intelligence is one of Saban's best qualities

Alabama’s ugly September wasn't the first time panic has bubbled up around Tuscaloosa, but this one felt different.

Maybe it was Saban’s age and the fear that builds with each birthday that his time at the top of the sport is coming to an end. Maybe it was the stark difference between what Alabama had looked like with Bryce Young, Mac Jones and Tua Tagovailoa at quarterback the last several years and the offensive disaster that they seemed to have on their hands with Milroe at quarterback. Or perhaps the inertia of name, image and likeness, the transfer portal and all the other big changes in college football had exposed some underlying weaknesses in how Saban was building his roster. 

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Whatever the reason, this one seemed like a five-alarm fire. The only thing that’s supposed to be burning at Alabama are victory cigars. 

“I mean, it was different, obviously,” said offensive tackle JC Latham. “We knew we would face (criticism) if we weren’t playing up to the standard. I mean, Alabama has a standard — national championship or bust. At that time, people couldn’t see us making it to this point right now. So that was a pretty big deal, but it was all of us together. It was a community of us who rallied together and told each other what we needed to do better.”

Among his many coaching gifts, Saban’s emotional intelligence — his understanding of the mental push and pull on players to extract their best performance — may be his most underrated. And that’s not easy to maintain year after year when the sport changes, when generations change and when there are different external factors each team has to deal with. 

“Coach Saban likes to say, ‘They don’t make ‘em like they used to,’ " linebacker Dallas Turner said. “That might be true.” 

But what Saban understands now, perhaps more than ever, is that the difficulty of being an Alabama extends far beyond the sprints and the drills and the butt-chewings he is famous for. He has built a machine that is expected to operate at peak performance at all times. When it doesn’t, the scorn is going to fall mostly on the players who come in and out every few years, and not as much on the coach who has delivered far more than anyone could have dreamed when he came back to college football almost 17 years ago. 

“It’s so expected to win every game at Alabama, and so when you have a game where you don’t win, then all the focus is, 'Well, the mystique is gone,' " Steele said. “He has an uncanny ability to manage that (noise), whatever it is.”

Steele has known Saban for nearly 40 years now, and there’s no difference in the day-to-day process, no difference in how demanding Saban can be behind the scenes, no difference in his drive to win titles. 

But on his radio show a few days after the Texas game, Saban went out of his way to remind Alabama fans that “it means more to (the players) to win or lose a game than anybody else, and I think sometimes people lose sight of that.” 

It was his way of telling millions of people to back off and let him coach this team in his way, spinning the positive, forward-looking narrative he felt his players needed to hear. 

Now they’re in the College Football Playoff and may be 10 days from celebrating another national title. Saban has long since set a new bar as the greatest college football coach ever, but if he pulls this one off, his words and tone may be as much of a factor as his X’s and O’s.