Nick Saban: I approach every season like I just took the job

It’s been an interesting offseason for Nick Saban and Alabama. He has two new coordinators on staff, will have a new starting quarterback and will try to get back atop college football after missing the College Football Playoff last year.

Every year has its changes, though, and that’s why Saban said he takes a unique approach to the new season.

“I’ve said this before, but I look at every season like I just took the job,” Saban told reporters. “So if I just took the job, what would we have? We’d have new coaches, we’d have new leadership, we’d have to create a new culture on this team. We’d have to create new leadership on our team from players, as well as coaches. I would have to make sure that the coaches really understood the culture and the system that we wanted to play, whether it was offense, defense or special teams.”

“It’s great to have continuity, especially in leadership positions,” Saban continued. “But this is not something that we don’t have some experience at making sort of adaptations, being flexible, betting people add things that they know will be beneficial to us, contribute to how we can fix some of the problems that we’ve had in the past.”

Nick Saban: ‘New energy and new enthusiasm is always helpful’

Alabama lost offensive coordinator Bill O’Brien to the NFL as he returned to the New England Patriots. Saban hired Tommy Rees, 30, to replace him. That came after defensive coordinator Pete Golding left to take the same position at Ole Miss, which led Saban to bring back Kevin Steele as defensive coordinator.

So, the coaching staff is filled out. Now, it’s about building the player leadership — and Saban said that’s going to take some time.

“New energy and new enthusiasm is always helpful,” Saban said. “That’s what we’re basically going to try to do with the new people that we have, and hopefully, we’ll have some players that step up and become leaders. But they’re going to have to earn the right to do that.

“We haven’t picked a leadership group yet. We have an advisory committee, and what the advisory committee is supposed to do is go back to their room, to their group and advise them of my and our message that they all need to understand. Whoever does that the best has obviously got a chance to be a leader, but we haven’t decided who that is yet. So they have to earn the right to do that.”