Nick Saban's opening thoughts after the Tide's 49 21 win over Kentucky
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00:00 How we doing?
00:04 Good.
00:05 So look, I'm really proud of this team.
00:09 This team has come a long way.
00:11 These guys have worked hard.
00:14 There's great togetherness, good leadership on the team.
00:17 A lot of guys have made significant improvement because they've stayed positive and stayed
00:22 the course in terms of listening to what the coaches had to say about what they needed
00:27 to do to improve and actually have really good relationships with each other on this
00:32 team.
00:33 So I was really pleased that the team didn't buy into, you know, the rat poison or whatever
00:40 you want to call it.
00:41 I thought this was a little bit of a trap game.
00:43 And I actually asked the players yesterday in the team meeting to stand up and say what
00:50 they had to do, each position, each leader at each position.
00:54 And I told them before the game I trusted that they would go out and do that.
00:58 And that's exactly what they did.
00:59 So I trust in these guys that they're going to do the right things, make good choices
01:04 and decisions, which is going to help them continue to grow and develop as a team and
01:09 hopefully finish business throughout the rest of this season in terms of what we have to
01:15 do to continue to get better and see if we can create an opportunity for ourselves.
01:23 Obviously it's great that we won the West and have an opportunity to play in the SEC
01:27 Championship game, which I'm very happy for this team that they were able to accomplish
01:33 that.
01:34 I think there's probably very few people after the Texas game or the South Florida game.
01:39 A lot of naysayers out there never really believed in these guys, but I've always believed
01:44 in this team and trusted in this team that they would develop into something that's special
01:49 and it has been special.
01:50 It's been a great experience to see them grow and develop and the confidence that you need
01:56 to play really, really well.
01:59 I think they were so excited about the fact a couple of guys came up to me and I always
02:04 talked to them about when we play on the road, you know, if you enter the stadium, that means
02:11 you can really beat the other team.
02:13 So a couple of guys, I didn't use that in this game, but they certainly got the message
02:20 and said, "Hey coach, look around."
02:22 So I'm pretty proud of them the way they played today.
02:24 And obviously there's some things that we can correct and fix.
02:28 We made some errors that obviously we busted on the 60 yard run at the end of the game
02:33 when we put the twos in there, but these are all learning experiences that these guys will
02:37 have an opportunity to get better at.
02:40 You know, Jalen played really well.
02:41 I thought, you know, the offense started the game out and set the tempo of the game extremely
02:48 well.
02:49 He played extremely well.
02:51 The whole idea was the way they play on defense is take what the defense did, gives, and we
02:56 nickel-dimed them in the first couple of drives and then we hit a couple of big plays.
02:59 So I thought they did a great job on offense and great team win for us.
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