It's good to see that many of you guys have the correct view of this. It's absurd to generalize that the team didn't play "with heart" or maximal effort. As for coach's rant about people complaining about a 14-13 win, he's right. Anyone complaining about that have lost perspective about what is important.

Honestly though I haven't seen many, if any, people complaining about that. What they are complaining about were all the mental errors that were made and confusing the mental errors with a lack of heart. There were also times, especially with the offensive line, where the man was just flat out beat. This was also confused with the lack of heart.

It seems clear to me that neither of these are about heart. The former seems to happen the worst possible times and unfortunately have happened in several games this year. Saban seemed to be as frustrated as I was when those errors occurred. Mental errors should be a fixable problem. If they continue and there is no change in personnel, I think it is safe to assume there must not be a better option waiting in the depth chart and we are stuck with what we've got. Unfortunately, the latter problem will have the same fate and we will just have to realize that we just arent that good this year. At least not as good as in previous years.

I know one thing for certain. Saban doesn't like having a bad football team any more than any of us and will correct the issues through recruiting and coaching changes if necessary. He already addressed some of the issues with last years recruiting class with all the offensive linemen he took (3 of them rated #1 at their respective positions). One might have even been able to conclude what Saban's opinion of this offensive line based on last years overwhelming emphasis on quality offensive linemen. Saban has to rely on his coaching staff evaluations of players under their specific expertise and perhaps some of those evaluations were not that accurate. At any rate, I suspect that we haven't seen more of them because of other issues we are not privy to (playbook, size, strength, etc).

In the meantime, enjoy the wins that Saban's second worst football team since being at Bama can scrap and fight for. If the past is an indicator, we won't have a bad football team in but one out of every 6 to 7 years. Who knows maybe this team will improve this year. Every other team sans the first seems to get progressively better as the season goes along. The fact remains though that we may lose some even if we do get better. But it wont be a lack of effort. It will be because the other guy was better.

This post was edited on 10/14/14 at 5:32 pm