Nick Saban reveals his approach to handling outside noise, how it can serve as motivation

Motivation is a significant factor in college football and you can just about always find a coach or a player harping on something that was said about the team or himself, some outside noise, to get a little extra juice.

Just ask Ohio State coach Ryan Day, who took a quote from 86-year-old Lou Holtz about the Buckeyes not being a very physical team and blasted him after a big win over Notre Dame.

Clearly it had been weighing on him.

“I think ideally you’d like for everything to be intrinsic, all of us,” Alabama coach Nick Saban said on the Pat McAfee Show. “Like our motivation comes within us because of what we want to accomplish and what we want to do. But in the reality of the world, especially with young people today, because everybody kind of grows up getting a lot of positive self-gratification or negative self-gratification from what somebody else thinks, whether it’s Twitter, some Internet device, whatever it is, ESPN, what people say about you.”

In other words, it’d be ideal to be able to tune everything out. That’s rarely realistic in today’s day and age.

So how do you use the outside noise to help you?

That’s something Saban has seemingly mastered during his time at Alabama, when he just about always pushes the right motivation buttons to get his team ready to roll. And the head coach admitted he uses that external motivation, in a couple ways.

“To ignore the fact that people are affected by external factors I think is not smart in this day and age,” Saban said. “And I think you do have to use those things sometimes as, A, rat poison when it’s good, but, B, sometimes as a motivating factor when you’re getting dogged a little bit out there for something that you’re not doing correctly.”

Saban’s ‘rat poison’ technique is plenty famous by now.

He’s essentially found a way to downplay praise of his program and turn it into a motivating factor, convincing his players that the positive outside noise is intended to lull them to sleep and get them to stop focusing on what made them successful in the first place.

And that sure seems to be one of the real secrets to Alabama’s consistency.

Saban has also been pretty open about his approach on the flip side, when things aren’t going well and the things being said in the media are harsh, rather than kind. In those instances, he opts to build his team up with a little more positivity.

In essence, Saban seems to strike a balance right down the middle of positivity and negativity when it comes to the outside noise. Hard to argue with the method from one of the game’s greats.