The Alabama Crimson Tide held their first scrimmage of the preseason Saturday afternoon at Bryant-Denny Stadium. The scrimmage lasted roughly 130 plays and just over two hours, according to a release from Alabama’s sports media-relations department.
From a transcript released by Alabama, here are coach Nick Saban’s opening comments after the scrimmage:
“This scrimmage is pretty much what we thought it would be. I think the players that have experience, that have played before, really played well. First teams operated pretty well for the most part. Much better execution with the first unit – first defense, first offense.
“The younger players, the more inexperienced players, the concept of – I heard Curtis Martin say this the other day, ‘Your irresponsibility become someone else’s responsibility.’ – so what happens when you’re not responsible enough to do your job? That creates an issue for someone else, and they try to make up for what you did, then they can’t do what they’re supposed to do, and you don’t have any team execution. It all comes back to every individual having the discipline, mental toughness, focus to be able to effectively do their job.
“I think at this time of camp, things are really, really hard. I don’t think hard necessarily is bad; I think life is hard, but I don’t think it’s bad, I’m not complaining. It’s hard right now – we’re working a lot of hours, we’re practicing a lot – it’s hard on the players, but it’s not bad.
“The one thing that we can control, probably can’t control our circumstances all the time or opportunities, but we can control our work ethic and how we go about things to get better, and I think that’s what we need to focus on with our players – being positive and trying to get everybody to improve. I’m sure a lot of young players learned a lot about the experience that they had today first time out there, having to make calls, coaches aren’t around telling them what to do, so it’ll be a really, really good learning experience for them.
“We’re looking for guys that have toughness, and I’ve defined toughness for you before, it’s ‘what is your breaking point?’ Where do you break? I don’t care if it’s the heat, you’re tired, I don’t care what it is, but where do you break? So we have got to have enough mental toughness to stay focused to sustain things, and we also have to have some competitive character.
“Anybody that has competitive character can deal with failing because the failures are what you have to compete through, what you have to learn from, the best opportunity to improve. Play the next play, don’t let it affect you, don’t let it bother you, so we have a lot of young players that need to grow and mature in all these areas so that they can go out there and play more effectively, and I think this will be a great learning experience for them today.”
About the Author
