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Nick Saban speaks to Alabama standard, but raises idea of ‘bump in the road’ after 16 years
By Keith Farner
Published:
Nick Saban often speaks to the Alabama standard, but recently, he raised the idea of a “bump in the road” as the Crimson Tide wrestle with an uneven start to the season.
Alabama is trying to bounce back from not only the loss to Texas, but a sub-par effort at South Florida that seemed like a loss with how Saban and the Tide discussed it. There was also a quarterback change and a players-only meeting.
“The standard here doesn’t change, but this is also a test of your humility,” Saban told ESPN on Thursday. “You say, ‘Hey, I don’t care what anybody says. I know what the expectations are.’ But, I mean, how many people have been able to go 16 years and not have a bump in the road?”
Previous bumps in the road could be the losses to Ole Miss and Hugh Freeze, or the bowl loss to Utah. But it’s difficult to find a situation at Alabama that mirrors this season during the Saban era.
After all, this is the first time Alabama is ranked outside the top 10 of the AP Top 25 poll since 2015.
Many expect a better effort than the Tide showed in Tampa. And the consensus about Jalen Milroe being the starter has settled, again. Saban expects a response, and believes he has a better team than the Tide showed last week.
“I don’t know if we’ve got a good enough team to beat Ole Miss or anybody else we play, but we’ve got a better team than we played last week,” he said. “Texas has a damn good team, probably one of the best 5 teams in the country and we were ahead of them in the fourth quarter.
“I like this team. I like this group. They’ve worked hard. They’ve got a good attitude about things. We just got to execute better and pay better attention to detail, and we’ve got some areas on our team that need to play better.”
A former newspaper veteran, Keith Farner is a news manager for Saturday Down South.
