Kirk Herbstreit on Alabama's ability to retool year to year

Alabama football is known for consistently producing national championship contenders that contain a plethora of future NFL talent. Every year, the Crimson Tide has multiple players selected in the first round of the NFL Draft and many others taken in later rounds. Despite consistently losing talent each year, Alabama is always able to stay competitive as one of the nation’s best teams. Nick Saban’s ability to retool at Alabama is highly impressive to ESPN’s Kirk Herbstreit.

Despite having to constantly retool, Alabama sees continuity as well

In addition to losing multiple key contributors to the NFL from last year’s undefeated, national championship team, Alabama lost offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian. Sarkisian is now the head coach of the Texas Longhorns. Bill O’Brien, most recently the head coach of the Houston Texans, took over at offensive coordinator. Despite the change, Alabama’s offense looked very high powered in week one. A lot of that is because of O’Brien’s willingness to learn Alabama’s offense instead of making Alabama learn his.

Additionally, Saban always has Alabama prepared due to practices and work throughout every week. There might not be any teams better than Alabama. There also may not be any teams that put more effort into preparation each week. Alabama has consistently proven that it can retool at a high level. The Crimson Tide has won at least 10 games in every season since 2008. Against Miami, Alabama looked like another double digit-win season was on the way.

“The only thing I can say, really from 2008 to 2021, we’ve been watching this,” Herbstreit said on SportsCenter Monday night. “The only thing I can tell you is [Nick Saban] recruits better than anybody. He develops better than anybody and he’s very consistent. Bill O’Brien came in from the Texans. He picked up the offense that [Steve Sarkisian] was running — no new terminology, same offense. Bill O’Brien had to learn that offense instead of the entire offense learning his offense. Now he gave it a little bit of tweak here or there but it’s the same offense. So he’s come up with ways of creating continuity, even though he’s lost tremendous players and tremendous coaches every single year.”

Herbstreit: Practicing against the best every day helps Alabama

Alabama is known for consistently dominating most every opponent it comes across. A lot of that is because the team must face tremendous talent each and every day during practice. This means each side of the ball faces some of the nation’s best players all season long.

“The other thing is they work so hard in practice that people don’t realize the games are easy in comparison to what they face in practice — good against good, the intensity, the energy, the competition level,” Herbstreit said. “So when they get in the game, they’re probably the most prepared of any team that gets ready to play on a Saturday, especially coming out of camp. They really work at it. And so those scrimmaged and the things that they do against each other, they get against Miami — who’s a talented team — and it’s much easier.”