Nick Saban on adjustments after LSU: Football is a copycat game

LSU was a 28.5-point underdog against Alabama last week, but only lost by six points. Did the Tigers give other teams a blueprint to contain the Crimson Tide offense?

Nick Saban discussed that possibility on “Hey Coach and The Nick Saban Show” on Wednesday. A caller asked about making in-game adjustments against LSU — a team that did things Alabama had never seen before — and Saban gave a lengthy answer about how to adjust in the “copycat” nature of football.

“I think you have to systematically have ways, that the players have background, that you can draw on to be able to say, ‘Hey, Florida did this and this is how we had to adjust,'” Saban said. “The one thing that we always do on Monday is anything we had an issue or problem with in a game, we do what we call a ‘corrections period.’ [It] has nothing to do with the next team we’re playing, alright? But there’s so much copycat that goes in all of football. In high school, college, NFL, [if] you see a team that does something or has a blitz that works against you, you’re going to see it again.

“If we can’t match a pass pattern on defense, we’re going to see it again, so you have to be able to adapt and adjust. So if we make those corrections after every game, we should have given our players some sense of what to do if those situations ever came up again. That’s a responsibility that we all have, but because they had never done those things, it wasn’t fresh in our [minds] and we didn’t have the tools in some cases that we’d like, but we’ve corrected all those things and I think that we won’t have those issues in the future.”

How LSU beat Alabama

LSU held Alabama to just six rushing yards on 26 attempts, but Crimson Tide quarterback Bryce Young still threw for 302 yards and two touchdowns. Alabama averages 152.7 rush yards per game, and the Tigers did a great job neutralizing the running game.

Brian Robinson Jr. had 18 yards on the ground and found the end zone on a two-yard run. Robinson ranks fourth in the SEC with 90.5 rush yards per game, so taking him out of the equation gives opposing teams a huge advantage.

The only other game Alabama had less than 30 rushing attempts was against Florida, when the Crimson Tide ran the ball 28 times and scored 31 points. That was their previous low score before the LSU game, so that could be a trend to watch going forward.