It’s easy to look at Alabama’s upcoming nonconference slate and wonder if the Crimson Tide are trying to secure four easy wins outside of the Southeastern Conference.

Alabama’s “big” nonconference game this season is a neutral site showdown with Duke in Atlanta in the season opener. The Tide then return home to play New Mexico State, Southern Miss and Western Carolina all in Tuscaloosa to round out the nonconference slate. That’s a manageable slate for any SEC team, not to mention the reigning league champions.

Among the recent critics to call out Nick Saban and Alabama for the program’s 2019 nonconference slate was FOX Sports analyst, Colin Cowherd.

“Look at Alabama’s schedule. The four games Alabama could control, because the SEC hands out the schedule but they can control four games, they scheduled Duke, New Mexico State, Southern Miss and Western Carolina,” Cowherd recently said on his show. “I wouldn’t walk across the street to watch those games – and Nick Saban controls that. Nick Saban doesn’t control the other eight, he controls those four, and Saban complains ‘the students aren’t coming out.’ Yeah, because they have a life! They have options there’s a bunch of stuff on TV or on their phones.”

Cowherd may have a point but according to Saban, he is always trying to push toward tougher schedules. The problem is, the rest of college football isn’t eager to follow in his footsteps just yet. A long-time proponent of moving the SEC to a nine-game league schedule and having Power 5 teams play only Power 5 opponents, Saban said this week that Alabama simply can’t find many opponents willing to play them.

“I think the culture of college football would benefit if we said Power 5 teams have to play all Power 5 teams. I’ve been an advocate of this for several years,” Saban said during an appearance on ESPN’s “Golic and Wingo” show. “I’ve been an advocate of playing more SEC games. Well, I think you should do it like basketball, they have RPI, or whatever it’s called. And basketball says these are the teams that played the best schedule and won the biggest games. So that’s how you qualify for a bowl game, not how many games you win. So that it would be better for fans, it would be better for fan interest.

“So we’ve tried to schedule two opponents — Power Five opponents — every year. We have one time in the next 10 years, we’ve succeeded at doing that.
So unless we change the culture of how we all agree to schedule, I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

The Alabama coach then went on to explain why his program has played so many neutral site games in recent seasons — which has seemingly been an annual occurrence under his leadership.

“The reasons that we played all these neutral site games, it’s the only way we could get a quality opponent. And if you are in a conference, where your natural rivalry is out of your conference, like Georgia plays Georgia Tech every year, so they got to get one more game and they’ve got 10 Power 5 schools. Our two natural rivalries are in our league — so we don’t have one of those. So we have to get two teams to play us every year. And we’ve done a pretty good job of that, for the most part.

“People look at this year schedule and say, ‘Why are they not playing more of out of conference schools that are really highly ranked?’ Well, we tried, is all I can tell you, we try and we try every year.”

You can check out the full segment below: