Nick Saban ‘pretty pleased’ with Alabama’s first scrimmage, praises Bryce Young
By SDS Staff
Published:
Alabama’s first scrimmage of spring practice is in the books. Nick Saban said he was “pretty pleased” with what he saw from the team.
“There was a lot of good hitting, and, there was a lot of good things to teach from,” Saban told reporters in his Friday press conference. “We’ve got a lot of young guys playing a lot of positions, so I’m sure this first experience out there is going to help them be able to sort of do exactly what I said — find out where they are, what they have to do, what they need to learn and how they can go out there and play with more confidence because they have a better understanding of what to do, how to do it, why it’s important to do it that way. So for a first scrimmage, we’re pretty pleased with it.”
Quarterback Bryce Young received a positive review.
“Bryce did a pretty good job of managing the game and was accurate with the ball and did a nice job. Made a few explosive plays,” Saban said. “But I thought really did a good job of managing the whole situation on offense when he was in.”
Even with those explosive plays on offense, Saban was pleased with the first-team defense.
“The defense played fairly well,” Saban said. “But it’s hard to tell how much you’re challenged, sometimes, when you have a scrimmage. I’m sure we have a lot of things we can improve on, and certainly, our goal is to get better on third down to play better in the red zone [and] some of those things we still need to make improvement on defensively.”
The second-team offense made some mistakes Saban chalked up to youth.
“I think we’ve got a lot of improvement to do, especially with twos on offense. We’ve got a lot of young guys playing in the offensive line with Emil out … And we put a lot of stuff in probably for the first four or five days and it’s a lot for a young player to digest. So when we eliminate the mental errors, I think we’ll see a lot more consistent execution out there on both sides of the ball.”
Saturday Down South reports and comments on the news around the Southeastern Conference as well as larger college football topics.
