Alabama Football: Reasons Behind Nick Saban's Latest Press Conference Rant

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — In what has otherwise been a slow bye week for the Alabama football team, on Tuesday Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban decided to add a little bit of excitement to it, lighting his first press conference fireworks of the season over a five-minute exchange about his new offensive coordinator.

To be sure, this was not the fiery-rage Saban that we saw before the Tennessee game in 2011 or the appreciate-your-interest-in-the-game after the D.J. Fluker story dropped right before Texas A&M last season.

This was Saban seeing a window and taking it, raising his voice a little and sprinkling in some humor to drive a couple of points home that emerged after Alabama’s resounding 42-21 win over Florida, one that had many giddy over the Crimson Tide’s explosive offense and some suggesting that offensive coordinator Lane Kiffin could someday become Saban’s heir.

I won’t reproduce the full text of Saban's comments from Tuesday night here, but I would encourage you to watch the video of it to get the full context and body language of what Saban said.

Saban’s motives here were twofold.

The first one was to fight offensive complacency among his team after its biggest offensive output of the season and fourth-most in school history. The second was Saban seeing a window to take a jab at everyone who questioned his hiring in the offseason.

If this wasn’t like his 2011 pre-Tennessee or 2013 pre-Texas A&M rants, it was more similar to one early in the 2012 season on the Saban rant-o-meter, as Andrew Gribble of AL.com noted:

Alabama was coming off its 2011 national title and squashed some offseason complacency concerns with an emphatic 41-14 win over Michigan to start the year. Saban noted a lack of humility after that game, especially preparing to face Western Kentucky, and took exception to what was being written after a very impressive win.

Saban turned out to be right, as Alabama slogged out an uninspiring 35-0 win over the Hilltoppers the next week.

That’s very similar to what’s going on here.

Yes, Alabama’s performance against Florida was outstanding, on paper.

But as Saban has been quick to point out twice now this week, the team took nine penalties on that side of the ball, including several “administrative” penalties, as Saban called them—avoidable mistakes like false starts and illegal formations that occur before the ball is snapped.

Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

It also had four turnovers, three of which resulted in Florida touchdowns, the Gators’ only points of the day.

“In my opinion, we have not arrived as an offense, and (Kiffin) would be the first to tell you that. And I will tell you that too,” Saban said. “I've already said a lot of things that we did in the last game would get you beat. You turn the ball over four times and have nine penalties on offense, you're not going to win very many games. Now, we won that game, but they didn't generate any points on their own, only off of turnovers.

“And we made a lot of explosive plays and we controlled the ball, especially in the second half. There's a lot of things we need to do better.”

Unlike in 2012, Alabama doesn’t get Western Kentucky next.

It will travel to Ole Miss, ranked No. 10 in the AP Poll and No. 11 in the Coaches. The Crimson Tide will have to play much cleaner against an opponent like the Rebels to come out on top.

That’s not Saban lashing out at a particular writer or the media as a whole. The main audience for that message is his team, who might have it sink in a little more if they see it on ESPN or all over Twitter.

The same can’t be said for the second part, though.

When the reporter followed up about Saban’s relationship with Kiffin getting better—implying, fair or not, that it’s had some rough patches—Saban took that opportunity to do a little I-told-you-so about hiring Kiffin.

The question was a fair one. We’ve all seen the pictures...

...and the memes.

Saban, of course, denied there ever was a rift.

“It's never been bad,” he said. “Whoever said it was bad, so why does it need to get better? I thought something had to be bad before it needed to get better. So why do you ask me has it gotten better? That assumes it was bad, that it was worse at one time. So now we're in love, we fell out of love and now we're back in love.”

Saban is right to feel validated after making a much-scrutinized hire. Kiffin has, to this point, turned Alabama’s offense from a steady, efficient machine into a juggernaut. And he has avoided all of the off-field noise that haunted him at his previous stops.

Kevin C. Cox/Getty Images

The hire is starting to look like one of the best Saban’s made at Alabama.

“I got beat up like a drum for doing it, and now all of a sudden it's great,” Saban said.

“You guys (the media) don't have any consequences for what you say and do. Our stuff ends up out there on the field on Saturday, and if it ain't done right there's consequences in front of a whole bunch of people, however many people watched the game. How many people watched the last game? What was the rating, like 5.1? How many is that? And however many was in the stadium. It's a different kind of scorecard than you all have got to live with.”

Overall, Saban’s comments Tuesday night were not nuclear like they have been in the past. But when the Alabama coach speaks up, people listen.

He picks his spots carefully, only once or twice a year. This time, like most times, it wasn’t really true anger or directed at anyone in particular.

Saban uses the media to get through to his team when he otherwise can’t. And sometimes it’s just for a victory lap when a criticized hire turns out to be a brilliant move.

Marc Torrence is the Alabama lead writer for Bleacher Report. All quotes were obtained firsthand unless otherwise noted.

Follow on Twitter @marctorrence.