Jason Jackson explains how much 'extra juice' Alabama got from knocking out Auburn

Alabama baseball continued its quest for an SEC Tournament title as the Crimson Tide knocked out rival Auburn along the way.

Alabama took down Auburn 7-4 Thursday and interim coach Jason Jackson realized the extra juice that came with the game. Heck, any time the Crimson Tide can beat the Tigers, or vice versa, that school is going to go nuts.

Alabama and Jackson advanced in the tournament and staved off elimination.

“Yeah, anytime you play your in-state rival, it’s going to give you extra juice,” Jackson said. “Ton of respect for those guys. They have a great ballclub they’ve been playing — we’ve had a really good back half and they’ve had just as good of a back half they’ve been playing really well, too.

“You knew it was going to be a good ballgame today, but yeah, definitely always a little extra juice when you’re playing your rival for sure. We’re just trying to go one game at a time. Our message today was let’s go 1-0 today. And we’ll kind of have the same message tomorrow, one game at a time.”

Alabama fell to Florida 7-6 in 11 innings Wednesday. It left a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth.

But when the scoreboard said Alabama over Auburn, it was extra sweet this time.

“Nice to be up here,” Jackson said postgame. “A little bit better feeling than last night. The guys did a great job of coming out today on kind of a quick turn around for both teams. We felt like coming into this game whoever could bring that energy early on and get out to an early lead was going to have an advantage. We knew we had G-Mac on the mound and he was going to give us a great start, and he certainly did that but we were able to get on the board early with Tommy’s home run.”

Jackson made sure to give his Alabama guys credit for knocking off Auburn following a gut wrenching loss.

“It’s a credit to these guys after last night and you lose a heartbreaker and you go back to the hotel, and like I said in here in this press conference, it’s okay to be pissed, it’s okay to be ticked off, but don’t bring it with you to the yard today,” Jackson said. “And you could tell this morning when we were in our pregame stuff, they were loose as could be and we were riding on the bus over here, and you could just feel it, they had kind of turned the page. We said, let’s make sure we don’t bring it to the yard with us today, and you could tell right away that they didn’t.”