The Alabama Crimson Tide are in the thick of their spring practice season, and it’ll be interesting to see how the revamped coaching staff works together.

However, the Tide still have Tua Tagovailoa at quarterback and a number of other star players returning, so they’ll still be a good bet to reach the College Football Playoff.

One thing that needs to happen, though, according to Tagovailoa, is that the Tide need to start taking games against lesser opponents more seriously. As you can see below, he said that lackadaisical efforts against lower-level teams came back to bite the Tide against Clemson:

“I can’t think too much about the good, because a lot of the bad still stands there,” he said. “I think the biggest thing that stands out from last year would be the things that I didn’t correct throughout the little games, throughout the games where we played teams that weren’t up to our competition. We made a lot of mistakes and we could get away with it. That ended up catching up to us and I think that’s something big that we can all take from as a team.”

Based on those comments, New Mexico State (Week 2), Southern Miss (Week 4) and Western Carolina (Week 13) will need to watch out this fall, because things could get even more out of hand than normal.