re: Official In-Season Practice, Injury Reports and Press Conferences Thread: 12-0

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Alabama head coach Nick Saban batted in the heart of the order on Wednesday’s Week 10 SEC coaches teleconference, and he was asked a lot about the LSU Tigers, as well as his current Crimson Tide team.

Below is the full transcript of what Saban said Wednesday morning as the fifth coach on the teleconference.

“This is obviously one of the biggest games of the year. It always is. They’re always very, very good. This game always has significance in our division, and it certainly does this year. Our players have done a good job all week of trying to get ready for a very, very good team. Probably as good a team as we’ve played all year, especially the way we’re playing now. This will be a very challenging game for us, and we’re looking forward to a great football game.”

What do you see in Dave Aranda’s defense that impresses you?

“They’re very well coached. They play a good scheme. They have good players that are very disciplined in the way they play. We played Wisconsin a year ago and felt the same way about how they played. I think everybody doing their job and being sound and disciplined in what they do is what makes them really good because they have really good players. They’ve got a really good secondary and their front guys are good. They have good pass rushers. Their inside ‘backers are good. This is a really, really quality defensive team.”

As you get into mid-November, how much does depth come into play as far as winning games?

“I think it’s critical. I think it’s a critical factor. I think that you lose a guy here and there _ whether it’s we lost Eddie Jackson or whatever _ if you don’t have a lot of depth on your team... I always thought it was interesting, Don James, who was the first guy I worked for, used to say the quality of your team long term is going to get determined by the bottom 40 guys on your team not the top 40. Sometimes that makes a lot of sense, especially when you get in this time of year.”

When you first got to LSU, did you think that if you just locked down Louisiana, you’d be able to build LSU into a national power? And how were you able to convince those guys to stay in-state that maybe in the past would’ve gone elsewhere?

“First of all, you try to have a quality program and add value to the players, convince them that they’re going to have an opportunity to develop personally, academically and athletically in the program that you have. That’s always been our goal wherever we’ve coached. That’s what we tried to do there. Louisiana has really good high school football. There’s a lot of good football players in the state. I don’t care what state you’re coaching in, I think it’s important that you do a good job in your state getting the best players that you can get. That’s what we’ve always tried to do here at Alabama. But even at LSU, we had a significant number of guys that were contributors that weren’t from Louisiana, but I think it’s most important to get the guys in your home state.”

Ronnie Harrison was primarily a quarterback his last couple years of high school. What’s your process like evaluating a quarterback to play another position for you in college, especially on the defensive side of the ball?

“I think the first thing is is you look at a guy athletically and say this guy is a good enough athlete to play someplace. We were fortunate enough to get Ronnie to come to our camp early in his career and got to see him do some things as a defensive back. That really convinced us that he could be a really, really good player, and he’s certainly turned out that way.”

Do you credit any of his success to that because he was a quarterback, maybe he has a better understanding of things like coverage concepts and route trees? Or is that sort of overblown?

“I don’t know if it’s overblown or not, but I do think that guys that play quarterback most of the time have a bigger picture understanding of the game because of what they have to do as a quarterback whether it’s what the offensive team is trying to do or what the defensive team is trying to do. In most cases, in my experience, guys that play quarterback that have the physical characteristics and meet the critical factors to play another position are fairly instinctive guys that have a pretty good understanding of the overall game.”

What’s been the difference in LSU’s passing attack since the coaching change?

“I think they’ve made a lot of explosive plays. I think they’ve got a very, very talented group of receivers. I think their quarterback is very smart in the way he sort of implements their offense. I think he gets them in and out of good and bad running plays and I think their play action game and vertical passing game is something that they’ve always had, but I think it’s more effective now relative to their skill guys and their quarterback. And they’ve made a lot more explosive plays.”

Evaluate what you’ve seen out of the LSU offensive line and how they’ve looked this year.

“They’ve got a very good offensive line. They’ve got great size. They’re very athletic guys. They get good movement in the running game. They have a great understanding of what they’re trying to do on the plays that they run and do a really effective job of executing and playing together. This is a very, very good offensive line.”

What have you seen out of your secondary throughout the season? Are they improving as much as you’d like them to improve?

“Well, I think at times we’ve played very well and at other times, I would like for us to play better. And hopefully we can continue to be consistent in that. I think it’s going to be very important this week because of the vertical passing game that we’ll face that our secondary plays very good in run support but also has great eye control and discipline to be able to play the play-passes and the vertical passing game.”

What did you think when Pete Jenkins got back into coaching with Ed Orgeron? And did that surprise you?

“No, not at all. He did it a USC for a while. Pete’s a great coach and did a fantastic job for us when he coached for us at LSU. We’ve always had Pete come and visit as much as possible to try to help our coaching staff. Pete’s arguably, maybe one of the best defensive line coaches of my coach era, that’s for sure. I have that I kind of respect for him. He would be a great addition to any coaching staff, college or NFL.”

When you have a guy visit your staff and then later he’s coaching against you, is he a guy that might have some trade secrets about you that you maybe wouldn’t have told him if you knew he was going to be coaching at LSU?

“When we have guys visit us, we’re trying to get their trade secrets. We’re not really trying to give them ours. But Pete coached for us before; he knows who we are and what we do. But there’s a lot of coaches out there that have coached for us. I would say just about every week we’re playing against somebody that kind of coached for us somewhere along the line and kind of knows something about what we do.”

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