’Bama players keep expectations high
“Thinking about last year’s national championship isn’t going to help us get this one.” Alabama All-America defensive tackle Jonathan Allen
The national titles are impressive, of course. Four of them, including three in the last five years.
A better measure of Nick Saban’s greatness, however, is the expectation that is now being passed from one Alabama class to another. Winning, or at least playing for, a national championship is the only acceptable way to end the season. Anything less is considered a failure.
“I look at my sophomore year as a lost year for us — and we won the SEC,” All-America defensive tackle Jonathan Allen said Tuesday, referring to Alabama’s loss to Ohio State in the semifinals of the inaugural College Football Playoff in 2014.
“We just have high standards and high expectations for ourselves, and when you don’t meet them you’re disappointed.”
Sure, it is preached by the coaches, this legacy of success. But it is the players who have ensured that all that talk gets translated into titles.
It is little things, like telling a teammate who is walking off the practice field to pick it up because that’s the standard at Alabama. Or pulling newcomers aside to warn them that practice is going to be far worse than the horror stories they’ve already heard.
It is checking anyone who shows even the slightest hint of complacency or arrogance — which, to be fair, is to be expected among teenagers and young 20-somethings who know no other view than the one from the top. It is holding each other accountable, on and off the field.
“I wouldn’t say (it’s a) joyless existence. That’s just the mindset you’ve got to have if you want to be great and have a legendary legacy,” Allen said. “If you want to do that, you have to have that relentlessness to your work ethic and your grind.
“Thinking about last year’s national championship isn’t going to help us get this one.”
It is hard to win one title, let alone string together enough to venture into dynasty territory. A look at the last 25 years suggests it might be even harder now, what with the proliferation of televised games and the reduction in scholarships leading to an increase in parity.
Nebraska (1994-97) is the only other team since 1992 to win three titles in a five-year span. Only two others, LSU and Florida, won two in five years. (Southern California split the national title with LSU in 2003 but was stripped of its Bowl Championship Series title from the 2004 season.)
“Building it is hard work. You have to push yourself day in and day out just to be great,” defensive lineman Dalvin Tomlinson said. “To maintain is pretty much the same level of work, but you have a bull’s-eye on your back all season.”
Maintaining that same, relentless demand for excellence is tough amid the constant turnover of players and coaches. Messages and schemes that once were innovative and exciting eventually become stale and ineffective.
Yet Alabama has managed to avoid the slide back to the pack. It has won three consecutive Southeastern Conference titles and four in the last five years, and it is the only team to make the Playoff all three years.
If Alabama beats Washington in Saturday’s Peach Bowl semifinal, the Crimson Tide would play for their fifth national title since 2009. If Washington wins, the Huskies would be playing for their fifth national championship — in school history. And you have to count the ones they got from folks such as the National Championship Foundation and
Football News to reach that number.
And as much a credit as that is to Saban, it’s even more so to his players. They easily could have slacked off after the second or third title but have come back even hungrier.
“We feed off (Alabama’s) past, and we don’t want to downgrade,” linebacker Reuben Foster said. “We want to keep the process going and keep the tradition going. The ’Bama way.”
Saban is as demanding as they come. His players no less so.