Nick Saban evaluates Alabama's progress so far during spring

Per usual, Alabama has several holes they need to fill this spring. With so much turnover on their roster, everyone wants to know where the Crimson Tide stand at this point in the spring and how it could look by the time they head into next season.

Well, Nick Saban provided all that information and more during the opening statement of his press conference on Thursday. After five practices, he said the best progress he has seen is in the young players and new faces who are getting extra reps over this period. Even so, he said there’s a focus by he and his staff to continue to coach everyone on the roster during this time to see how every player could potentially make an impact on the team.

“We’ve had five practices now. We are making progress,” started Saban. “This has been a great opportunity for a lot of young players. I think everybody knows we have 26 mid-year guys. Plus we have a significant number of guys that aren’t participating in the spring due to injury, which creates even more opportunity for those guys.”

“We continue to try to coach everyone on the team,” Saban said. “Ones and threes, twos and fours on another field so that everybody’s getting coached. Everybody’s getting an opportunity.”

However, Saban went on to say that the Tide are dealing with the usual growing pains that come with the spring. He highlighted Alabama’s meticulous process as an area of improvement for the whole roster to focus on. Once they better grasp on that, he knows the results that the players are looking for will eventually come.

“We got a long way to go,” Saban continued. “We got a lot of guys that don’t have a lot of confidence in what to do. (They) don’t have a lot of confidence in how to do it. And then don’t have a lot of understanding in why it’s important to do it that way. But that’s why we need to practice. And, hopefully, we can focus on what we need to do to develop, improve, and not be so concerned about the outcome that we have.”

Nothing about what Alabama is doing right now would be considered big-picture. It is all focused on doing the little things right now so that they’re not hard down the line. That’s why, as of now, Saban doesn’t lean any particular way with where his team is at the moment. The only thing he knows for certain is that there’s a lot of time left between now and kickoff this fall.

“I’m not pleased with where we are, I’m not disappointed where we are,” said Saban. “I think it’s just a work in progress that we’ve got to keep grinding through each and every day.”