Nick Saban addresses how he formulates his game week messages at Alabama

Alabama head coach Nick Saban is the best college football coach of the 21st century and one of the greatest coaches ever. A huge reason why he’s been so successful is that he’s become a master of motivating his players and teams.

While he was making an appearance on the Pat McAfee Show, Saban addressed his weekly messages to his team and how he actually comes up with those messages for his players.

“I actually use other people to try to stimulate my thoughts as to what I should or shouldn’t say and how I should say it,” Nick Saban said. “I have a sports psychiatrist that I talk to probably two or three times a week and between us, between the circumstance you’re in, the team that you’re playing, the outside noise that most people are hearing including your team, you try to come up with a message that is a positive one to help them move forward. So, I don’t try to invent all this stuff on my own.”

Another place that Nick Saban draws from is the speakers that Alabama has speak to the team in Fall Camp. The motivation that they can offer to the team is something that he takes note of and helps distribute later.

“We had like 14 speakers in Fall Camp and a lot of them were inspirational speakers. I sit in the front row every day and I take notes on everything that every guy says and if there’s any bit of that information that I could use down the road to reinforce to players because they’re gonna hear it but they’re not gonna remember it two months from now. I’m always gathering information. I’m always reading books about how do you affect human behavior because that’s what we’re talking about. You guys just call it motivation, but you’re really trying to affect human behavior in a positive way so people can get the most out of their talent and ability.”

For Nick Saban and Alabama, motivation is incredibly important because of human nature. Saban is looking to build a championship team, which goes beyond what most people naturally are going to do.

“I think we’ve talked about this before. Human nature is to survive. It’s not to win the championship. It’s to survive, it’s to do what you have to do to survive. You tell a guy, ‘You sell 10 cars you get to go to a trip to the Bahamas,’ after he sells 10 cars, he’s going home, sitting in his chair, and eating Tostitos and drinking beer. He’s not going to try and set the record for how many cars you can sell in a month. That’s human nature. That’s normal,” Saban said.

“So, we’re trying to take people from normal human nature to be the best you can be. We sometimes assume that just because someone has talent, they want to be the best that they can be, but that’s not necessarily the case. So, you’re always trying to close that gap. I call it the capability gap. What are you capable of versus what are you doing, and you’re always trying to close that gap, and if you can do that and get everybody to buy into that then your team starts playing to their potential. Individuals do too and it creates value for them to do it as well as the team.”

Nick Saban on handling outside noise

The reality is that teams hear the outside noise about them and the teams that they’re playing. For coaches like Nick Saban, it becomes incredibly important to manage that noise.

“I think ideally you’d like for everything to be intrinsic, all of us. Like our motivation comes within us because of what we want to accomplish and what we want to do. But in the reality of the world, especially with young people today, because everybody kind of grows up getting a lot of positive self-gratification or negative self-gratification from what somebody else thinks, whether it’s Twitter, some Internet device, whatever it is, ESPN, what people say about you,” Saban said.

“To ignore the fact that people are affected by external factors I think is not smart in this day and age and I think you do have to use those things sometimes as, A, rat poison when it’s good, but, B, sometimes as a motivating factor when you’re getting dogged a little bit out there for something that you’re not doing correctly.”