Former Alabama QBs Cooper Bateman and Blake Barnett recently told ESPN they were unhappy with Nick Saban’s lack of communication about the QB battle in 2016.

Bateman, now at Utah, and Barnett, now at Arizona State, said it started against USC, the first game of the season.

“According to him (Saban), I was their guy,” Barnett told ESPN. “Once Jalen went in, I was expecting it. But then he went out on the next series, the next series and the next series. I don’t know if everything was communicated correctly.”

Similarly, Bateman was disappointed in how things were communicated, and he knew immediately it wasn’t going to work.

“How things were communicated, there was a lack of communication,” Bateman said. “I knew I didn’t want to be involved with that anymore … I knew after that first game that I didn’t really want to be a part of it anymore.”

Over the last few days, Saban has had a chance to reflect on those comments, and ESPN’s Chris Low asked him how he felt after hearing their comments.

“We try to give everybody a fair chance, you know, to win the position. I feel like it’s my job to do a good job of making the best choice and decision for our team. And one of the most difficult things is sometimes that’s not what everybody else would like for it to be. You can’t make everybody happy. Everybody wants to play; I have a tremendous amount of respect for those guys as competitors. I tried to do the best job that I could to tell them exactly how we were going to play the quarterbacks and the opportunity that they had. I wish those guys well. They did a great job for us and this program, and I hope they do well wherever they choose to take their career now.”

As I said in a previous post, Saban is paid millions of dollars to make the best decision for his team. It was obvious that Jalen Hurts was the best decision. Now, Alabama was talented enough to win a bunch of games with Blake Barnett under center, too, but it was also obvious to many that the Tide’s offensive upside was capped with Bateman at QB. No other way around it.