Nick Saban shares his take on how this unique offseason will affect Alabama’s players heading into the 2020 season
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Regardless of how long you’ve watched or followed college football, you’ve never seen an offseason quite like this one. None of us have.
Even the coach regarded by most as the best to ever do it is learning on the fly as the moment he found out Alabama’s spring practice has been suspended, Nick Saban went to work in an attempt to do his best to adjust to these unprecedented times.
In a recent interview with Scott Van Pelt on ESPN’s SportsCenter, the Alabama coach shared his reaction to learning that spring practice was suspended.
“The first thing I did is, they told us on March 13, which was a Friday, which was the last day of school before everybody went on spring break, that we were shut down and we couldn’t have spring practice, we couldn’t do any recruiting,” Saban shared on the show. “Immediately, I just started to develop a new plan for, you know, how are we going to move forward with our team and our players?”
With everyone going through an offseason unlike any other, Saban has picked up on the fact that the team’s virtual meetings appear to have sharpened his players’ minds on the playbook and the adjustments the Alabama coaching staff has made this offseason.
“One of the things that I’ve noticed sitting in on these Zoom calls every day because we could do it slow, we could teach concepts,” Saban continued. “There’s been some tremendous teaching going on that, when you have players for 20 hours a week and you got a 45-minute meeting and then you got to go out to practice, sometimes you can’t do quite as good a job of teaching off the field and you got to depend on what you have to do on the field.
“What we’ve been able to do off the field, I think, is going to enhance the player’s chances of development when they get back – whenever that might be.”
Unfortunately, losing the spring and much of the time in the facility this offseason news is likely to be less beneficial in one key area of Saban’s team.
“I think the players that will be most affected by this are going to be the young players because I think spring practice is the first real opportunity that they have to learn things at a really snail’s pace,” Saban added. “You don’t have to get ready for games, you’re not putting up new game plans every week. Where they don’t – they struggle because they don’t even understand the basic concepts and spring practices, where they learned basic concepts.
“So, if we can do some of that summer, I think that will really help them in the fall, but I think the young players are the guys that are going to have the toughest, most difficult time adapting to no spring practice.”
A graduate of the University of Tennessee, Michael Wayne Bratton oversees the news coverage for Saturday Down South. Michael previously worked for FOX Sports and NFL.com
