Nick Saban gives pep talk to team on playing to win

Alabama is looking to bounce back from there 52-49 upset loss to Tennessee as they take on Mississippi State at home this weekend. The Crimson Tide won’t only be playing on ESPN at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, but it is also their homecoming, which head coach Nick Saban and his team are looking forward to.

“Well we’re certainly looking forward to getting back home and playing in Bryant-Denny Stadium on Saturday night, homecoming is a great tradition and I know it gives a lot of people who are Alabama folks an opportunity to come back and refresh some of relationships and traditions they enjoyed when they were here and what they were proud of,” Saban said. “And we certainly want to play the game in a way that they can be proud of what we do.”

There were a few areas of Alabama’s last game that Crimson Tide faithful could be proud of, but more to be disappointed in, as Tennessee kicker Chase McGrath nailed a 40-yard, game-winning field goal as time expired that broke the hearts of many Alabama fans.

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But it is a new week, and Saban is challenging his team to play with a different mindset against the Bulldogs in front of their home crowd this weekend.

“I think the big emphasis for our team this week is playing to win. There’s a difference between playing to win and playing to keep from getting beat, when you’re playing to keep from getting beat the game’s really not about winning, it’s about being afraid to mess up, painting negative pictures in your mind of bad things that could happen and that doesn’t help you have success,” Saban said.

The Crimson Tide surely played to win against Mississippi State last season, defeating them 49-9 on the road last year, ironically, following their regular season upset loss to Texas A&M. Hopefully for Alabama, they can respond in a similar fashion this year as well and get their season back on track.

“So we want to be positive, correct mistakes, have the goal to be to go out and be aggressive and execute the way you’re capable of executing. Capability and reliability to execute under any circumstance, we certainly have the capacity to do that, we just gotta do it with consistency and that’s what we’re looking forward to trying to do,” Saban said.

There are certainly plenty of mistakes to correct from last week for Alabama, including giving up the most points in school history since 1907 and setting a school record for penalties with 17. If the Crimson Tide can clean up their own mistakes and adopt Saban’s play-to-win mindset, they can surely have a better weekend than they did last week in Knoxville.