Nick Saban goes all-in on rat poison rant ahead of Texas A&M, drawing strong parallels to last season

While Alabama is rightly a large favorite over Texas A&M for when the Aggies come to Tuscaloosa this weekend, head coach Nick Saban is once again wary of the “rat poison” out there for his team to ingest. He likened the scenario to last year, where Alabama went to College Station and lost.

It was a classic Saban diatribe, going off for a few minutes on his weekly radio show “Hey Coach & The Nick Saban Show” on Thursday evening about how important it is for his team to keep the focus internal.

“Let me just say this, aight,” Saban said, “for all you people out here who don’t understand rat poison: We were in the same situation last year that we’re in now. Team was 3-2, they lost a couple of games they shouldn’t have lost. They got a very talented team, a very dangerous team, and they come and play a great game against us — which they’re capable of doing — and we didn’t play very well against them because we listened to all the rat poison all week about being favorites and this or that. And everybody criticizing them and what they’ve done, but it doesn’t matter. It’s what we do. It’s how we — it goes back to that same thing: It’s you versus you. It’s not really about your opponent. It’s about what you do to get ready to play and be the best player that you can be. And not listen to all these external factors that affect players.”

CLICK HERE to subscribe for FREE to the On3 YouTube channel

Saban added that the intensity of practice this week has been good and he wanted it to carry in to the weekend. How the Crimson Tide practices and then plays has a lot more to do with the outcome of the game than whether Alabama is a prohibitive favorite.

Besides, Saban noted multi-touchdown favorites have lost this year.

“You’ve got to have respect for what it takes to win. You’ve gotta respect winning and what it takes to win against good players. And they’ve got good players. They have a good team. They have a really good defense. Quarterback’s very athletic. They got some really good skill guys. Some really fast guys. No. 6 scored on a kickoff return on us last year. He’s a dynamic player. So I don’t know when people learn,” Saban said. “I think Notre Dame got beat when they were 20-point favorites. Somebody else got beat early in the season when they were 20-point favorites. I don’t even know what the line is on this game. But the point of that is, that doesn’t really matter, because the game gets decided by how you play.”

Saban wrapped up his brief rant with a salient point: Writers and talking heads don’t pay the same press for picking a game wrong as a team does for overlooking something and losing.

“No disrespect to the media folks that are here,” Saban said, “y’all don’t have to be accountable for what y’all say. You pick things and you say things and you do things and ‘They’re gonna win this and that’ and all that, and if it doesn’t happen, you don’t have any consequences.”

“I don’t live in that world, we don’t live in that world,” he concluded, to applause from the room.