Nick Saban sends message to coaches with underperforming players: 'You always have the bench'

Aspects like energy, effort, and pride came into question with Alabama this week, coming off its opening loss at Florida State. Nick Saban offered a solution, though, on where teams can put problems like those ones when they come up.

Saban further discussed the Crimson Tide’s loss in Tallahassee last weekend while on ‘The Pat McAfee Show’ on Friday. That included him saying that this season is not over for ‘Bama if it can get the right buy-in throughout the program, especially now coming off their upset.

“I think that’s the way the players should think. That’s the way the coaches should think,” Saban said of Alabama’s season. “They’ve got to stay focused on what they need to do to teach and get better, create roles for the players on their team, and how they can support the team.

“You know, there’s one thing about this that you and I, when we played? You know, we wanted to do well, we wanted to be good but we also had a responsibility to those guys over there standing on the sidelines that was on our team and that’s a responsibility that everybody’s got to figure out in this day and age of football when there’s so much individual (and) name, image, and likness, transfers. Once you decide and make a commitment to a team, you’ve got to do a good job for yourself, but you also owe it to the guys standing on the sidelines or in the huddle with you. I think that’s an important thing for all these guys to understand.”

That said, again, this almost became less about the Tide losing, as much as it was about how the Tide looked while losing. There’s been plenty of national reaction to how poorly they played and with how little force they brought to the game on both sides of the ball after their opening drive.

With that, many have been comparing it to how much fire their former teams had under Saban. So, in his answer, Saban shared his ultimate motivator in sidelining those players who didn’t meet the standard, which is what teams like Alabama might be considering more with their own lineup now.

“You know, the one thing I always – nobody wants to be insignificant, and you always have the bench,” Saban stated. “If a guy didn’t do what he was supposed to do, he knew that, and it didn’t matter who it was. You know, I mean, you’ve got the bench.”

We’ll see how a team like Alabama reacts to what was, at times, some embarrassing play. Still, if they don’t, Saban hopes coaches know that the sideline is always there as an option.