Nick Saban Shares His Biggest Area of Disappointment from Alabama-Florida State

Former Alabama head coach Nick Saban took stock of the No. 8 Crimson Tide's 31-17 loss at Florida State this past weekend, and he noticed a major area of disappointment, one which has been echoed by a large portion of the fanbase.

“For me and a lot of the Bama fans, the disappointment [is] that Florida State dominated the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball," Saban said on ESPN prior to the game between North Carolina and TCU.

Nowhere was this more evident than in the totality of the running game. The Seminoles tore up the Crimson Tide's defense, which was missing lineman Tim Keenan III due to an ankle injury, to the tune of 230 yards and four touchdowns. Alabama had fewer than 100 rushing yards (87, to be exact).

"The good news is, every team has the best opportunity to improve from week one to week two," added Saban. "Going into the season, you don't really know what you have for sure as a coach, and you're always very anxious about what might happen in the first game."

The Crimson Tide, which faces Louisiana-Monroe at home Saturday evening, will need to make a drastic turnaround between game one and game two in order to reverse course on the current trajectory of Kalen DeBoer's second season as head coach.

"There’s some good spurts there in the first half where I thought, especially on the left side, they played really well. I think the consistency to finish drives, you know, longer drives, I thought later in the football game kind of weaned out a little bit," Alabama offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb said Monday morning.

"The biggest piece I think is the consistency part. We just got to be a little more consistent on how we finish drives."

Defensive coordinator Kane Wommack wanted to see his team generate more pressures, which it was unable to do at an effective clip in last Saturday's loss, and which has been one of the stated offseason goals on that side of the football.

"There's times when in the second half I tried to call more pressure to generate a little bit more pressure on the quarterback. We were able to do that a little bit more effectively," Wommack said Monday. "Certainly, a from a pressure standpoint, that's something that I've got to make sure that we can affect quarterbacks better than what we did Saturday."