There are few coaches, if any, in sports with a better pulse on their team than Nick Saban. That’s true even when Alabama loses.

On his weekly radio show Thursday night, Saban admitted that in the locker room before facing LSU, he grew concerned about the lack of confidence on the faces of his players. At that moment, Saban could see something was amiss.

“Sitting in the locker room before the game, I was really nervous about the way our team looked because they didn’t look like they usually do,” Saban said on his radio show. “They were kinda quiet and not how they usually are and it was (a) concern. You never know how they’re going to respond when they go out there and start playing, so I think there was a lot of nervous energy and I think there was a lot of anxiety, and I think that’s really what I was trying to avoid.

With that context, it’s not at all shocking Alabama fell behind early, 10-0, and then eventually, 33-13, by halftime. However, the break after the second quarter allowed Saban to settle down his team.

“I think once we got in there at halftime and I said ‘These are the things we wanted you to do. We didn’t do any of those things in the first half so let’s just settle down and do those things and do them well and we’ll get ourselves back into the game'” Saban said. “And they responded well because there wasn’t all this anxiety about what’s going to happen if this happens and that happens and all that. You can’t think about all of that.”

Usually, coach’s radio shows are not enlightening at all, but how interesting that Saban took his guard down a bit to give Alabama fans and the nation a little peak behind why the Crimson Tide started so poorly against LSU.