Nick Saban explains how he defines success on and off the field

For Nick Saban and the Alabama Crimson Tide, it was a slow and frustrating start to the season, particularly in non-conference play. Since then, Saban has seemingly steadied the ship and been able to find success this season.

For Saban, it’s important to have success on and off the field, and he opened his Wednesday press conference by speaking about success and how he defines it in terms of consistency.

“I guess what we all do is, we want to be successful,” Nick Saban said. “I think success is probably defined by how consistent you can be, in terms of the way you perform, no matter what it is that you’re trying to perform. Two things enhance that: you have to have knowledge and you have to have belief, and sometimes, it’s difficult to develop that knowledge because you have to go through some hard lessons of learning and growing to develop that. It’s a big part of preparation, and you have to invest a lot of time.”

Another key part of success for Nick Saban is how relationships are handled. Having strong relationships helps with communication. That helps people, both on and off the field, become more consistent like Saban wants to see his team play.

“The other part of that is relationships and caring enough to communicate because you’re confident in what you’re doing because you have the knowledge, and now you communicate it. The relationships that you have with other people on the team can actually help you feel good about communicating, and that helps everybody play smarter. That helps everybody play better,” Saban said.

“I guess that’s what you continue to strive for — for players, for your team, for individuals — so we can get the kind of consistency in performance that will help us be successful. That’s a challenge every week. It’s a challenge every day. Hopefully, people are motivated to do that and are doing the best they can to make the progress we need to make to try to improve.”

This week, Alabama will play rival Tennessee in Tuscaloosa. Throughout that game, Nick Saban will undoubtedly be looking for his players to communicate well and play consistently.

Nick Saban laments rivalry games disappearing on yearly basis

With conference realignment, schedules are rapidly changing. Some teams won’t play traditional rivals anymore because of it. In other cases, the scheduling models within conferences are changing to keep rivals from consistently playing. For many people, including Nick Saban, this is a sad change to the sport.

“I always think that that’s happening all over college football, where you’re going to have these great rivalry games that players, fans, everyone at programs sort of look forward to that are not going to be able to exist on a year-to-year basis,” Saban said. “I think there’s a lot of people that are disappointed in some of those things.”

Under the SEC’s format of playing one protected rival plus seven rotating opponents, Alabama wouldn’t be able to play both Auburn and Tennessee, among other traditional rivals, every season.