How can Nick Saban's defense stop the team that spoiled the Crimson Tide's hopes for a perfect season last year?
Alabama won its third BCS title in four years last season, solidifying the Crimson Tide as the most dominant program of the current era. If you're a current Alabama player, however, you can be forgiven for feeling like you missed out on the celebratory reverie. "After the national championship game, we had a team meeting," Saban said at the
Nike Coach of the Year Clinic this summer. "I told them they were not the national champions. 'Some of you played on the national championship team, but you are not the national champions.' I went on to tell them what this team does will only be defined by what they could do from this point on."
In Saban's world, you become -- and remain -- a champion by fighting against complacency and measuring yourself against one goal: perfection. And as great as Alabama was, they were not perfect; Heisman trophy-winner Johnny Manziel, quarterback for Texas A&M, saw to that last season by delivering the Crimson Tide their only loss.
Alabama's weight rooms replayed the loss to the Aggies on an endless loop.
"Each year we go through our schedule and decide which team we have to beat to compete for the conference championship," Alabama defensive coordinator Kirby Smart
said this summer. "We have to decide what we have to do to defeat that team." This summer, the television screens in Alabama's weight rooms replayed the loss to the Aggies on an endless loop; it's a pretty good bet the focus of Alabama's offseason was on Texas A&M and Manziel.
Manziel dominated the offseason coverage, but he gained his status through the incredible things he did on the field, not least of all against Alabama. Manziel molded Texas A&M coach Kevin Sumlin's system in his image, into a kind of streetball air raid, where the
offense's uptempo no-huddle and wide-open formations were merged with Manziel's improvisational savvy. Before the game in Tuscaloosa, a reporter asked if Manziel reminded Saban of Tim Tebow or Cam Newton.
Saban said he didn't, and instead said Manziel reminded him of a different sort of quarterback. "I've been around longer than most, and most of our players can't relate to this, but this guy reminds me of Doug Flutie,"
Saban said. "I played against him a long time ago, but he was a really good player and a really good competitor, and that's who this guy reminds me of."
Suffice to say that as much as Saban, Smart and the rest of Alabama's coaches and players are concerned with Texas A&M as a whole, their concern can really be condensed into one very specific issue: Nick Saban has a Johnny Football problem, one he's been working all offseason to solve. And to find the answer to his current problem, Saban might be looking to his past.
