Nick Saban to players: Put playoff speculators 'on the hot seat'
Alabama will look to avoid a letdown this week when it travels to Kentucky. The Crimson Tide is coming off back-to-back emotional wins over rivals that it lost to a year ago, which would only be natural for there to be a bit of a psychological dip for the players. But with a chance to clinch the SEC West in Lexington, Ky., Nick Saban had a message on Thursday.
And he is using Alabama’s ranking in the College Football Playoff Top 25 as motivation.
“I asked the players tonight after practice, I said, ‘How do you feel about this season?’” said Saban on his weekly radio show. “‘How do you feel about the opportunity that you created for yourself? And how do you feel about winning out and trying to put all these people who want to speculate on who’s going to get in the playoffs, put them on the hot seat in terms of making a determination about do we belong or don’t we belong?
“But we have to take care of our business first.”
After its second win over a ranked team in as many games, Alabama remained at No. 8 in the second CFP Top 25 rankings of the season. The Tide (8-1, 6-0 SEC) is the third-highest team with one loss in the latest standings, trailing No. 6 Oregon and No. 7 Texas, which defeated UA in Week 2. Few expected Alabama to leapfrog the Longhorns because of head-to-head, but an argument could be made for Texas and Alabama to both be ahead of Oregon.
The selection committee, however, didn’t see it that way – at least not this week.
“As we look at this as a committee, we continue to evaluate the play on the field. We continue to evaluate the resume, as well as statistics,” said CFP committee chair Boo Corrigan on Tuesday. “And Texas has the win over Alabama in Tuscaloosa, which was a significant game overall this season. As we look at that as well as Oregon continuing to play really well, their win over Utah and the balance of the top-five offense and top-15 defense.”
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There are five undefeated teams at the top of each Power 5 conference, so Alabama will need others to start falling to climb in the polls. But it also has to keep winning, and that starts with a road game at Kroger Field on Saturday, Nov. 11, for an 11 a.m. CT kickoff on ESPN.
“Every game is more important, especially when you’re having success and you have an opportunity to accomplish something of significance in the end,” Saban said. “You’ve got to embrace the opportunity, you’ve got to have gratitude that you have the opportunity and you’ve created it for yourself, but you also have to respect the fact that a lot of people and our players have really, really worked hard to get to this point and they made a tremendous amount of progress.
“I’m really proud of them. But you want to be proud of the way they finish, too. So we’ve got to build on that.”
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