Every year at about this same time on the calendar Alabama begins to operate under a cloud of uncertainty, because every year this is about when the coaching carousel begins and when you have the success that Alabama has had everyone on the staff is subject to rumor. This year the majority of the talk has centered around Alabama offensive Coordinator Lane Kiffin, who has been linked to various jobs throughout the sport.
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Thursday night during his coaches radio show, Nick Saban addressed what his hopes are for the mentality of any coach on his staff looking to move on to a bigger job.
"I want our players to be in the best position to be able to play well in this particular game, and I think all our coaches are very much committed to that as well, regardless of what you read on the blogs or hear or whatever," Saban said at Bob's Victory Grille. "I don't know about any of that stuff, so I'm not really bothered by it.
"... Everyone else's calendar, they're hiring and firing coaches, they're looking for new staffs, whether they got rid of their head coach or offensive coordinator or whatever happened, aight. So they're in a completely different mindset about where they are from a calendar standpoint and what they want to do to try to improve their program.
"We've had to deal with this quite a bit lately. I think we try to manage it where everyone of our coaches put our players first. We wanna win the game for our players. I mean we wanna win it for the fans, everybody's prideful about being able to win a championship. But you really wanna do it for the players, you wanna do a good job for the players.
"I don't see any coach on our staff who's not totally committed to doing a great job for that and doing a good job of trying to get it done in this game. We just have to manage that."
It's safe to say that if Alabama continues to experience the level of success it has the past several years this will continue to be an issue for Nick Saban and Alabama. Hopefully the mentality of everyone who takes a job on the Tide staff will continue to operate for the players and stay committed to the process.
