Nick Saban calls Georgia ‘one of the most complete teams in the country’ on eve of Alabama showdown
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Nick Saban sat with ESPN host Pat McAfee during his weekly Friday afternoon appearance on The Pat McAfee Show, and the legendary head coach was right in his element, except for one little thing.
He was in Tuscaloosa, where the show was being broadcast live from on the eve of the scheduled titanic SEC matchup between No. 2 Georgia and No. 6 Alabama. But while Saban was sitting in the location of where the latest installment of the rivalry will take place on Saturday night (7:30 p.m. ET, ABC) — weather permitting — the guy who’s seemingly always been a coach wasn’t about to coach in the Georgia-Alabama battle of unbeatens.
These days, Saban is an observer. He’s an analyst. Saban is a college football analyst for ESPN, and instead of breaking down film to go against his former Bama assistant, Kirby Smart, the head coach of the Bulldogs, he was breaking down the matchup from an outsider’s perspective.
Saban, who beat Georgia in the 2017 national title game and who lost to the Dawgs in the 2021 national championship game, had particularly high praise for the Bulldogs as they travel to Tuscaloosa for a matchup that could be affected by Hurricane Isaias, which has strengthened into a Category 3 storm.
“I think Georgia is one of the most complete teams in the country,” Nick Saban told McAfee. “I know they haven’t been tested, but they haven’t been behind, they’ve dominated the competition, which that’s hard to do sometimes when you’re supposed to win and you go out and win like you’re supposed to. And they’ve been able to do that.”
Saban then looked ahead to Saturday night and what that could mean for the Dawgs against the Crimson Tide.
“How they’ll fare against a little better competition, look, I think teams that have success and have won championships, they’re never gonna say die,” Saban said. “They’re gonna compete in the game for 60 minutes. There may be some adversity for them in the game, but they’re gonna keep playing. Whoever’s going to beat them is going to have to play for 60 minutes to do it with the same kind of temperament and attitude to play a complete game.”
Saban has coached in a few of these Georgia-Alabama showdowns, and here comes another one on Saturday night, weather permitting. Here is what the Kalshi market is currently saying about which SEC behemoth has the edge in the Week 6 matchup in Tuscaloosa:
Cory Nightingale, a former sportswriter and sports editor at the Miami Herald and Palm Beach Post, is a South Florida-based freelance writer who covers Alabama for SaturdayDownSouth.com.
