Nick Saban Time Quotations

He has continued to do a good job every time he's been out there, ... and I think that's something that's got to be taken into consideration.

He is a bright guy. He has a pretty good understanding of what we're doing. It's just going to take some time to get him into football shape.

He looked quick. He looked fast. He made the right cuts. I'm not disappointed at all in the way he played for the first time out of the box.

I think there's a pretty good formula for guys who at some point in time were college coaches and then they go to the NFL and, in whatever capacity they serve, they develop even further. When they go back to college, they're even more prepared, and they succeed there.

We need a little time to figure that out. We're going to take it from where it is and build for 12 games.

We have total faith, trust and confidence in the guy. The guy has a tremendous amount of ability. He's going to be a long snapper for a long time in this league so the question is do we want to take the time to develop that or do we want to let him go snap for somebody else?

You know this is a time when nobody really ever really kind of tells the truth about what they plan to do. I certainly would never deceive you in anything that I told you, so rather than deceive you I would just rather not tell you certain things.

The Raiders had a hard time with him. He wrecked the game, creating two turnovers that really iced the game. He's a fantastic player.

When you go down and score the first time you have the ball, that sets the tempo for the game.

Well, he just didn't look comfortable all the time in terms of making decisions ... and that's something that you'd always like to do with your players is make sure you're asking them to do things they're comfortable doing. You play to their strengths.

We certainly created some adversity for ourselves to overcome out there, ... but I was really pleased with how we responded time in and time out. Nobody's ever happy with penalties. Nobody's ever happy with turnovers. But I think it's most important to establish how you respond to that stuff when it happens in the game.

Rather than wear him out, we played him about as much as we planned. We'll play him more and more as time goes on and he gets in better and better shape.

For his first time he did a pretty good job.

It's an expectation: What are the most important things to accomplish at this time? To find out as much as we can about what those combinations are may be more important at this time than the end result so we can build on a better end result in the long term.

It's difficult to know what 15 players are going to get picked before we pick. This is a time when nobody really ever really tells the truth about what they plan to do. We have to be ready and have every player evaluated.

If you don't have an indoor facility, you've got to cut down the practice time in preparation for the game so the players can recover. Or you change the environment they do the work in, which an indoor facility allows you to do. It's really a player health and safety issue as much as anything.

I have total faith, trust and confidence in the guy, ... He's going to be a long-snapper for a long time in this league.

I don't want to say he has a sore arm, but when you start to get one, that is the time to back off and not let it become one. I think that was what we were kind of doing as a precautionary measure today.

He put half of our defensive team in the training room for a week every time we played him. The thing that separates (Brown) from the other running backs available in this draft was his versatility and the number of things that he could do as a football player. I'm surprised that other people ... have not made a more significant emphasis about the versatility this guy has.