Nick Saban wants Alabama players to be paranoid, just like him

Nick Saban always has a message for his team. Following Alabama’s Week 2 loss to Texas, the head coach shared what he has told his players as they turn their attention to South Florida.

He wants them to be paranoid.

“The players need to understand that – somebody said – success is a lousy teacher, that it makes smart people think that they can’t lose, right?” Saban said on Thursday night. “Paranoid people always think somebody’s after them. And if you’re going to be a player in Alabama, you gotta be paranoid because every team that plays us is going to try to beat us because it makes their season, it makes their program. That’s all they talk about. 

“And I don’t really know if our players sort of get that all the time. They look at the game like it’s a game, which it is and we want them to – I don’t mean to say play ordinary – but being an ordinary mindset of what I have to do to execute and do my job not in some anxious way out there trying to compete and make mistakes and make poor decisions and judgments.”

The theme of paranoia came up after Saban discussed how good of a team Texas has and how poorly Alabama finished the 34-24 loss to the Longhorns last weekend. The Crimson Tide coach has preached all week about the need for better execution while commending the team mindset, whether before, during or after the game. And that starts with better commitment.

“It is hard,” Saban said. “Everybody doesn’t want to do hard. Talk about our season, talk about having a successful season. You know how hard it is to practice Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, play a game on Saturday, come back and watch the film on Monday and go practice again and get ready for another opponent, and do it for 12 weeks in a row? 

“And do it at a level of consistency where you’ve got to give great effort you’ve got to have great mental toughness, and you’ve got to have a tremendous amount of discipline to stay focused on being responsible to do your job, not only for yourself but everybody else is depending on you, too.

“How do you sustain that? You’ve got to be someone who’s got a really high standard for how they want to do things. You try to establish that in the culture that you’re trying to build, and you have expectations, and you don’t accept things that aren’t done in a certain fashion.”

An Alabama fan at Baumhower’s Victory Grille later asked Saban how he is able to maintained consistency throughout his coaching career, and he pointed back to his lesson to the team.

“I guess I’m just paranoid,” Saban said. “That means I always think somebody’s out to get me, so that means I always am really focused on what’s going to happen next. But I just think that you gotta be a perfectionist of sorts, and you have to have a very high standard of how you want to do things. 

“Not really what somebody else wants you to do but you want to do so and you’re willing to stay focused on the process of things that you have to do to be able to do that. And then you also have to have the discipline to be able to stay with it every day and execute, because that’s probably the hardest thing any of us have to do.”

To further get his point across, Saban used a story from Ancient Rome as an example.

“The Romans took the Cliffs of Dover when they tried and tried and tried and tried. And the captain says, ‘Hey, we’re burning the ships today, so there is no means to retreat,’” Saban said. “How many of us really make those kinds of commitments to things that we do? We’re gonna only do it to a certain level and we’re gonna have self imposed limitations I call it on just how much are we willing to commit to?

“So you want to be successful? Get paranoid. Think that somebody’s after you every day and somebody’s gonna get your job if you don’t do it better. Maybe that will get you going.”

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