Nick Saban goes in-depth on Alabama end of game situation vs. Texas A&M

When asked about the brutal ending to Miami’s loss vs. Georgia Tech, rather than brag in the face of another coach’s failures, Nick Saban explained how his team made a very similar error themselves this past week.

During his appearance on the Pat McAfee Show, the topic of the Miami game came up. In case you’re unaware, the Hurricanes had the ball and could’ve knelt on their remaining plays to end the game. Instead, they ran the ball with less than 40 seconds on the clock, fumbled to Georgia Tech, and the Yellow Jackets immediately went down and scored to win the game.

So, when asked about how his own team handles such situations, Saban explained how difficult those scenarios can be in the moment, pointing out that his squad goofed their own kneel-down opportunity vs. Texas A&M last Saturday.

“Like last week, we’re in four-minute. We’re trying to take the air out of it and we want to kneel on the ball. With 1:36 to go in the game, we actually could’ve kneeled on the ball. So, we make a first down, we don’t know if the player who caught the ball, if his knee was down when he caught the ball. So we tried to go fast and just hand the ball off.

“But they didn’t cover the receiver, so the quarterback decides to throw the ball out there. Well, the running back who thought he was getting the ball hits the quarterback’s arm and we stop the clock. So, terrible decision, terrible clock management. But if we could have knelt on the ball on that play on first down we could’ve ran the clock out,” Saban recalled.

“You also know, they don’t have any timeouts left, so how much clock can we melt by kneeling on the ball? We could’ve knelt on the ball and we were going to kneel on the ball after that play. But we stopped the clock so now we can’t kneel on the ball.”

Effectively, sometimes even best-laid plans aren’t enough in the moment.

“So sometimes, these situations and circumstances are well-planned in terms of what you’re trying to do. But then the circumstances flip the script, like last week. Everybody’s saying, ‘hurry up, they might review this play’ — so we try to run a fast play. We got to understand the situations so we don’t do what we did,” Saban continued.

“But at the same time, I understand why (Jalen Milroe) did what he did. (Texas A&M) didn’t even have a guy lined up out there on the receiver, so he thinks he’s gonna throw the ball to him. But it’s the wrong time to do it. We’ll learn from it and he’ll learn from it.”

After that dissection of the final drive, Saban then explained his team’s strategy on the final play of the game.

“With seven seconds or less to go in the game, we got fourth down. Seven seconds. You wanna punt? Because the only way you can lose the game is get a punt blocked,” Saban explained. “We rolled out, hold the ball for as long as we can, throw it as long as we can, and you time that play — and usually, if you have seven seconds, it’ll end the game, and that’s how we ended the game last week.”