Alabama has struggled these past two weeks, but Nick Saban and his players are ready to come home and rebound on Saturday against Texas A&M.
“We’re looking forward to being at home this week,” Saban said Wednesday. “It’s been a month since we’ve played a home game and it should be a great beautiful fall day for a great football game against a really good team.”
The Aggies bring their potent offensive attack to Bryant-Denny Stadium Saturday, coming off two consecutive losses to the state of Mississippi. While Alabama’s defense will have its hands full with quarterback Kenny Hill and the rest of A&M’s high-speed attack, it will be the Crimson Tide’s offense that may have to match the Aggies point-for-point, as it has in years past.
The first step for the Alabama offense to regain its confidence is to look back on what made them struggle against Arkansas last week. It could be attributed to multiple factors, but offensive lineman Austin Shepherd was the first to blame himself and his unit for the lack of momentum.
“Personally, I thought I played terrible,” Shepherd said. “I kind of take responsibility for it. I don’t think any of us had a good game. Probably the worst game we’ve played as a unit, just to be straight up. I mean, I thought we were prepared. We just kind of didn’t execute like we wanted to.
“I went back and watched it and it was kind of just one person here and there….We’ve just got to be more consistent.”
The next step for the Tide will be to get back on track with the flow of the offense. The passing game has sputtered with teams keying on Amari Cooper, and the run game couldn’t even muster 100 yards against Arkansas Saturday.
But the now infamous words of AJ McCarron may have worked as the leaders on the offense became more vocal and rallied around each other during the difficult stretches.
In a particularly crucial moment at Arkansas when Alabama was down a touchdown with a chance to take the lead, running back T.J. Yeldon said it was Crimson Tide quarterback Blake Sims who became more vocal and fired up the team to go score. The enhanced communication and support between players also showed when Sims botched a quarterback sneak on 4th and 1. His teammates could be seen rushing to his side to pick him back up.
“[Sims] was down and we just all gathered behind him,” Yeldon said. “We just have to have each other’s back when things like that happen.”
Saban is known to bring in speakers throughout the season to motivate his team and give them a different perspective. This week, Saban brought in Alabama golf coach Jay Seawell to talk to the team. Seawell has a first-hand understanding of the pressure of winning, after leading his team to three consecutive NCAA Championships and winning the last two.
“There’s an awful lot of anxiety with young people when expectations and the reality of the situation you’re in don’t quite meet,” Saban said. “[Seawell] said he had a lot of that on his team after they won the first national championship and came back for the second there were a lot of high expectations, a lot of anxiety. He actually showed them the movie Secretariat.
“They had so much pressure on them because of the debt they were in over the horse and the horse had to win the Triple Crown and the anxiety and the tension and all that,” Saban said, recapping the Secretariat story. “Finally, she just said, ‘Let the horse run.’ And it won by 31 lengths at the Belmont.”
With A&M in town and the Alabama offense angrily refocused, Saban hopes his team can hit its stride and pull away at the end, just like the tremendous machine that was Secretariat.
“That’s what we’re trying to get our guys to do. Just let them run, just let them play,” Saban said. “That’s why I was so happy with the last game, the way they competed in the game, how hard they played in the game. That’s really what we’re trying to get our players to do and that’s the way we’d like to finish the season with them.”
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