Nick Saban says his bloodshot eye is due to 'yelling'
When Nick Saban made his weekly appearance on The Pat McAfee Show on Thursday, he did so with some redness in his right eye. The Alabama head coach told McAfee he didn’t know what happened, but didn’t really address it any further before signing off.
Later on, during his radio show, he explained how he got the bloodshot eye.
Saban said he met with the doctor after practice on Thursday to find out what happened. As it turns out, he’s fully healthy. The issue came about in a very Saban fashion.
“It doesn’t hurt, but it does look bad. It looks like I’ve been in a gang fight and my gang didn’t show,” Saban joked on Hey Coach and The Nick Saban Show. “I go see Doc, he comes to see me after practice today. And he looks at me and said, ‘You been coughing?’ I said, ‘No.’
“He said, ‘You know, you can get this from yelling?’ … He says, ‘You got it from yelling. There’s nothing wrong with you. You just got it from yelling. So you busted a blood vessel in your eye from yelling too much.’ Probably because the players are talking to each other on the field. That’s probably the reason.”
It’s safe to say Saban wanted to make sure his players were practicing at full go ahead of this week’s big matchup against LSU at Bryant Denny Stadium. But when it comes to his message at the end of practice, CBS broadcaster Brad Nessler — Thursday’s media guest — asked Saban how he comes up with those remarks.
His main point was about staying focused on the task at hand, but he said it’s not always the same message every week.
“I do a lot of research, a lot of reading, on human behavior,” Saban said. “We’ve got three different people that I get input from on a weekly basis — two psychiatrists and one sports psychologist — about human behavior, how to affect it, what is a good message to be sending at this point in time? That’s kind of how, like when I said in the beginning about playing every play in a game, stay focused in the game.
“That’s what I talked to the players about today because that’s been an issue for us, to maintain our intensity and play smart and do things that don’t help the other team by the choices and decisions that we make. And everybody’s got a choice to make to do that and to see the importance in being able to do that. That’s what I kind of talked about today. But I mean, every time, it’s something a little bit different because the circumstances around the team change a little bit all the time.”