Nick Saban admits Miss Terry was heckled by Florida State fans after playoff snub

When the final College Football Playoff rankings were revealed, it would be Nick Saban‘s Alabama Crimson Tide that jumped an unbeaten Florida State team to make it to the Playoff. It was a highly debated snub that led to a lot of animosity from Florida State fans directed toward Alabama.

That frustration went so far that some Florida State fans even heckled Saban’s wife, Miss Terry.

“I mean, a lot of Florida State people called me,” Nick Saban said on The Pat McAfee Show. “I got thousands of phone calls and bad text messages and called every name in the book. Miss Terry even got called a few names. They did. We got in the playoffs and they didn’t.”

This happened to Saban while he was recruiting in the state of Florida. There, he says he tried to reason with fans by pointing to last season’s fifth-ranked Alabama team that got left out even though he felt they had a fair argument to get in.

“I was, you know, I saw Florida State fan, you know, when I was recruiting in Florida, and he kind of gave me the business and I said, ‘Hey, look, we were left out last year. We lost two games. We ended up fifth. We were the last team out. And we had a pretty good team. We lost two games on the last play of the game.’ It was our fault that we lost those games, but we got left out so we had a choice to make.”

Nick Saban explained that Alabama wanted to prove its worth in the Sugar Bowl. So, using insurance policies, he was able to help make it easy for players to play in the game.

“And our players got together and said, ‘Hey, we want to go prove in the bowl game that, you know, we should be in the game.’ We were playing Kansas State, Kansas State beat TCU and it was our opportunity to go play in the game and everybody wanted to play,” Saban said.

“And you know, we’d beefed up the insurance for our guys that were draft guys, which you know, maybe some people wouldn’t do but you know, our university was willing to do that and make a commitment to those players so they could play and not worry about injury and that type of thing. We went and played and had a lot of fun and had a great game.”

So, Nick Saban made sure to tell the Florida State fans critical of the decision the same thing. They had the chance to make their own statement, which of course didn’t happen in the end.

“A lot of people said, ‘Well, you know, maybe they should have been in the playoffs.’ So, I say, ‘You have the same opportunity to do that this year. You’re gonna play Georgia. If your team all bands together and says, we want to go play Georgia and beat them and show that we should be in playoffs.’ But that didn’t happen.”

Miss Terry opens up on how Nick Saban has handled loss in Rose Bowl

Shortly following the loss to Michigan in the Rose Bowl, Miss Terry went to Nick Saban to see if he wanted to watch another game. He didn’t. So, they agreed to watch Netflix instead. There, the pair likes to watch foreign language films because you need to pay attention and read the subtitles.

“It completely gets your mind off of [the defeat],’’ she explained.