NASHVILLE, Tenn. − A few faint bars of the Alabama fight song, “Yea, Alabama,” over a speaker system that didn’t exactly fill the room with sound, accompanied Nick Saban’s walk to the main podium at SEC Media Days on Wednesday. As walk-up music goes, it fell a bit flat after SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey had just introduced the coach with reminders of his seven national championships, various national coach of the year awards and his tutelage of a record four Heisman Trophy winners.
“Wow, that was quite a fanfare, I appreciate that,” the Alabama football coach said with a grin.
This is Alabama football, 2023: off radar, spotlight weakened, and to an extent not seen at SEC Media Days in more than a decade, no longer at the center of the bullseye for 13 other teams in the league. No longer lauded with the automatic presumption of winning the SEC West, no longer the favorite prediction for a national championship, and frankly, no longer feared.
Alabama is hunting, not the hunted, this season.
And this time, it will do so without the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback it had a year ago in Bryce Young, and without the wrecking ball of a pass rusher that was Will Anderson Jr.
“Take last year’s team − we had a great quarterback coming back, we had a great player in Will Anderson on defense, but we had a lot of question marks on our team that got overlooked because we had these two star players at critical positions,” Saban said. “This year, maybe we don’t have those kind of impactful players at those critical positions, so it’s very challenging to develop a team so that they can compete at a high level.”
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Forget for a moment that Georgia is aiming for a third consecutive national title; from Alabama’s perspective, that’s a few degrees removed from the smaller but more pertinent challenge at hand: replacing LSU at the top of the SEC West in the final year of the league’s divisional play. Without two megastars under pressure to carry the day, this Alabama team will have to develop emergent standouts who, like the team itself, aren’t encumbered by big expectations.
Saban, for his part, seems wholly unbothered, if not downright comfortable, in the position of chasing rather than being chased. And who can blame him? He’d rather be coming off another national title, of course, but for players, there’s a pure motivation in status lost; in recapturing a level of greatness that, not so long ago, was routine. In their own ways, Alabama’s player representatives at the Grand Hyatt Hotel − Kool-Aid McKinstry, Dallas Turner and J.C. Latham − all spoke to that on Wednesday. Meanwhile, Saban has two new coordinators, a quarterback battle, and plenty of retooling to do on defense, but from his demeanor at Media Days you’d never know he was uptight about any of it.
It’s Georgia that’s now the hunted.
And Saban doesn’t mind the view from the blind.
