Nick Saban spoke after Alabama’s 17-3 win in South Florida following a game in which the Crimson Tide were tied at halftime, 3-3.

The major storyline in the game was that Tyler Buchner started in place of Jalen Milroe, and then Buchner was benched in favor of Ty Simpson.

“Everybody has the opportunity to respond, in the right way when things don’t go exactly like you want them to,” Saban said after the game. “We play the guys that practice the best all week long.”

Earlier, Saban said the defense did an outstanding job in only giving up 3 points and that was after a turnover.

“I know that we struggled a little bit on offense,” he said. “We ran the ball fairly well, much better in the second half than we did in the first. But I’m really proud of our players with the way they competed in the game. I need to do a better job of getting them ready to play in games like this and we were a little flat in the beginning, but after the rain delay, I thought we competed better in the game. I want our players to be happy about the fact that they won and enjoy it for 24 hours.”

Saban acknowledged that SEC play opens next week against Ole Miss.

“Obviously we’ve got a lot of things to fix and we’ll work on it, but we’ve actually had 4 touchdowns negated this year because of penalties,” he said. “… So all these things add up to how much consistency and how well do you play, how many points do you score. So we need to fix all those things and we’re certainly going to work on it.”

About the quarterbacks, Saban said he would evaluate Buchner, Simpson and Milroe and decide which one gives Alabama the best opportunity to be successful.

About Simpson: “I thought he did OK,” Saban said. “Made a couple really good throws and we missed a couple big-play throws that we’ve been making some of those, I thought he played well, managed the game well. We ran the ball quite a bit when he was in there. I don’t think the sacks were necessarily his fault.”