Mediaboss Marketing

Alabama coach Nick Saban won't be going to a conservative approach on offense next season. He made that pretty clear when a reporter suggested as much after the Crimson Tide's first spring practice Tuesday.

"I don't know where you came up with where we go to ball control," Saban said. "That's not what we do. The New England Patriots threw the ball over 60-something percent of the time, which is more than we threw it. So, where does that assumption come from or do you do what everybody else in the media does -- create some s--- and throw it on the wall and see what sticks, which is what I see happening everywhere? And the people who scream the loudest kind of get the attention and then we pass some rule that everybody has to live with or some law and the consequences mess up a lot of other things. Do it all the time. We're doing it right now."

He added later: "Where did that come from? I never said that, nobody in this building ever said that, so where'd you come up with that? Just had a dream about it, or what?"

Not much is known yet about what Alabama's offense will look like under new coordinator Brian Daboll, but he has learned some of Tide's prior scheme.

The Crimson Tide had a 10-point lead in the second half of the national title game in January before ultimately falling to Clemson 35-31. In that game, the Tigers had a nine-minute advantage in time of possession. Since then, Saban has hired new offensive coordinator Brian Daboll, who spent the past four seasons on Bill Belichick's staff with the Patriots.

Saban said a lack of execution was to blame for the loss to Clemson.

"We didn't block them," Saban said. "We didn't execute very well. We didn't throw the ball accurately when we had open people and a couple of times we dropped it. I think it was more a lack of execution than it was something schematically that we were doing. ...

"If we had caught some passes in the national championship game -- we had some guys open -- we wouldn't have had to control the ball. We would have scored more touchdowns."

During his rant, Saban seemed quite displeased with new NCAA rules about high school camps.

"And we pass some rule that everybody has to live with, or some law, where the consequences mess up a lot of other things. We do it all the time. We're doing it right now. The NCAA is doing it. We're going to change the way we have summer camps. We can't have high school coaches working summer camps. I mean, it's the most ridiculous thing that I've ever seen. It is what it is and whatever they do, they do.

"So we say we don't want third-parties dealing with players. So we're not going to let the high school coach bring a guy to camp, but some third-party guy can bring him to camp now. Makes no sense at all. But all the people who have common sense, they don't say anything about it. But the people who scream the loudest will get the thing changed and it'll mess everything up. That's the way it goes. The way it goes in the world, politics, just the way it goes."

View post:
Nick Saban: Running a ball-control offense is 'not what we do' - ESPN