Nick Saban, Jalen Milroe break down final play of Rose Bowl loss
PASADENA, Calif. – Jalen Milroe sent Roydell Williams in motion. After receiving a low snap, he charged forward on 4th and Goal at the Michigan 3-yard line and was stopped at the two. The Wolverine sideline rushed the field as Michigan defeated Alabama, 27-20, in overtime to punch its ticket to Houston for the College Football Playoff National Championship Game.
Shortly after the Rose Bowl semifinal, Milroe spoke to reporters and shared his thoughts on the final play of the Crimson Tide’s 2023 season that came up two yards shy of the goal line.
“First thing, I’m appreciative of my coaching staff for believing in me to have the ball in my hands on that last play,” Milroe said Monday night. “You win some, you lose some. That’s all part of the game. With anything, all it came down to was fall back to your level of training, and we just failed on that play. That’s all it was.
“At the end of the day, I just trusted the guys up front for believing in me on the last play to have the ball, and unfortunately, we just missed and we just didn’t get in the end zone.”
Milroe was sacked six times by the Michigan defense, which resulted in a loss of 49 yards. The Alabama quarterback ran for 112 yards before the losses were subtracted, leading the team in rushing, but his final stat line was 63 yards on 21 attempts. Of his 15 carries, five of them were for 10 or more yards, but his final run needed to be a couple of more yards longer.
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Sitting beside Milroe in the postgame press conference, Crimson Tide head coach Nick Saban was also asked about the team’s final play of the day and why that was what was called.
“We called three plays,” Saban started. “One they called timeout, one we called timeout, and the last one that didn’t work. The fact that it didn’t work made it a really bad call. You know what I mean? But we called timeout because we had a bad look. We had a good look on the first one. They must have known it.
“But Tommy (Rees) just felt like the best thing that we could do was have a quarterback run, which was kind of our two-point play, one of our two-point plays for this game. The ball was on the 3-yard line, which is just like a two-point play, but we didn’t get it blocked so it didn’t work. We didn’t execute it very well and it didn’t work.
“They pressured and we thought they would pressure, but we thought we could gap them and block them and make it work, and it didn’t.”
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