CECIL HURT: When adversity looms, Alabama now has Nick Saban

TUSCALOOSA - It was a textbook example of how to handle adversity.

That’s an unavoidable way to say it, and not a painless one for the University of Alabama. The school has to resolve the situation that caused five players to miss what would have been, quite likely, one of the most memorable games of their college careers.

What will come of that in the long run? No one, not even Nick Saban, could say on Saturday.

But what happened in the short run? Saban took masterful advantage to teach one of those lessons that, as the cliché has it, you don’t find in a textbook.

Instead of bemoaning the circumstances that left Alabama bereft of five contributing players, including two starting offensive linemen and a running back, Saban seized the moment. Instead of panicking, or, even worse, carefully crafting an excuse, Saban went in the opposite direction.

“It wasn’t a problem,” Saban said, “because we didn’t make it a problem.

“It didn’t affect us at all.”

That attitude, as much as anything else, probably made the difference in Alabama 41, Tennessee 17. Sure, there were other factors, ranging from John Parker Wilson’s breakout performance to (in a related role) Tennessee’s defensive woes. You could even pinpoint specific plays, most particularly Kareem Jackson’s interception of Eric Ainge.

But really, it was about attitude. Saban’s attitude and, even more importantly, the attitude his team absorbed from his example.

The rebuilding job which Saban took on when he came to Alabama – what’s come to be known as “The Process” – involves recruiting, certainly. The long-term goal is for Alabama to sign better players than other teams in the SEC. That’s the part of the process this that a lot of people have chosen to focus upon, especially after Alabama’s two narrow late-September losses.

There is another part of the process, though. That part involves mental reconstruction. It involves breaking down the mindset of the team Saban inherited and replacing it with something different. It involves treating every single situation with a fierce determination to win. The fact that a situation is adverse doesn’t alter that determination. If anything, it amplifies the will to win.

That’s not necessarily an intellectual thing. There is a word that is best used cautiously in this context, but it seems to fit – spiritual. It’s almost a spiritual experience for the players to look at a situation in which logic suggests one thing and to then go out and achieve the opposite, primarily on the faith they have in their coach when he tells them they can achieve it.

It was telling that Saban told a story earlier in the week about his 2001 SEC championship game victory, coaching LSU past a highly-favored Tennessee team. In a nutshell, he explained how an ill-advised decision to gamble on an early fourth-down situation failed on the field, but worked in the mind of his players. Once the players knew that the coach believed, then they believed.

Did the game-opening onside kick against Tennessee send the same message? Did a similar decision to go for a fourth down in the first quarter trigger it? (It worked when a Tide shift pulled Tennessee across the line of scrimmage and a first down resulted.) Or was it Saban’s stubborn insistence that five suspensions weren’t going to have any effect at all on the outcome of the game?

It may have been any of those moments. It may have been a combination of those things, and a lot more. Whatever it was, Alabama – which had made two narrow escapes in the previous two weeks – played its best, most confident game of the season. Wilson – who was hearing calls asking for his backup to play coming from the stands in his last Bryant-Denny appearance – set personal records. The offensive game plan, heavily scrutinized in previous weeks, played like the score from a Mozart symphony.

It’s still early in the process for Alabama. There is still work to be done and lessons to be learned. For one thing, Alabama has to sustain the performance that it gave against Tennessee, and build on it.

It may be too early to proclaim Saturday’s dominating win as a “watershed” in Alabama football. It’s true that Alabama-Tennessee games often do turn out to be “watershed” events with larger implications than the final score. That’s one of the great things about the series – it’s a test in which both teams tend to be at the same emotional pitch. When one team wins in dominating fashion – like UT did in 1995, for instance, or like Alabama did on Saturday -- it often is a signal of things to come, on both sides.

Tennessee didn’t seem to handle playing at that pitch very well. Their day was filled with crucial penalties and a gradual slippage in their game plan. The Volunteers leave Tuscaloosa with their own issues to resolve.

Alabama has things to resolve, too, but one thing was certain on Saturday afternoon. Nick Saban isn’t going to let his resolve be affected by the eventual resolution – and he isn’t going to let his team be affected, if he can possibly help up.

There will be, in his phrase, no “going belly up.”

He said that in his postgame comments, but he didn’t have to do so. The game that his team played on Saturday made it perfectly clear.

Cecil Hurt is sports editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Reach him at

cecil.hurt@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0225.