Alabama Football: Training Days, Episode 3 hits a wall

The third installment of ESPN’s Training Days: Rolling with the Tide follows the Alabama football team through a grueling week of fall camp.

The opening shot of Training Days catches a weary-looking Nick Saban during practice as his Alabama football squad seems to have reached a breaking point. To further illustrate this, ESPN shows him wiping his brow in slow motion. Nick Saban tired? Surely not.

This seems to be a major theme of the third episode of Training Days: the willingness to withstand continued physical and emotional punishment on oneself.

It feels like we’re watching the team float down a treacherous river of obstacles headlong into the open arms of the enemy, like Marlow in Heart of Darkness.

At least this trek has steak and lobster.

Literally, all the food

If you are to take nothing else from this episode, just know that the Alabama football players eat well. Director of Performance Nutrition Amy Bragg is the poor soul in charge of feeding these walking trash compactors and the near tonnage of food they consume on a daily basis is absurd:

• 13,500 eggs per week
• 400-500 pounds of chicken wings on a given night
• 100 pounds of steak a night
• 70-80 pounds of lettuce a night (y’all, lettuce isn’t even that heavy)
• 100 pounds of bacon every morning

According to Bragg, the players burn around six to eight-thousand calories every day. It’s necessary to put back in what they lost. This, of course, means packing their three meals each day with an adult hippopotamus-worth of food.

Along with Scott Cochran, she has the most important gig in the entire program.

Finally, Damien makes an appearance!

I’ve been waiting for two whole episodes for the Alabama football players’ de facto ambassador to show up and he finally does in the third one.

Damien Harris is not only a stellar athlete, but you can tell he has a pretty good head on his shoulders, as well. And this is impressive not because he’s a football player, but because college students, by in large are idiots. Almost all of them.

Football players are not immune to this, but the focus is so much greater on the college athlete that we assume they’re boneheaded jocks, which they’re not. They’re just kids.

Damien, though, seems to be operating on a different plane than almost anyone at that age. It seems unfair that a guy as intelligent and well-spoken as he can, also, do this:

He’s one of the first players we see in this episode and he continues to pop up throughout as a voice of reason when things get sticky during practice.

Best guess, this is the exact role he’s going to play during the season.

Speaking of things getting sticky

There was never a specific moment, but you could really tell this episode was about the breaking point that Saban always speaks of at the end of every practice.

During one particular evening session, Anfernee Jennings and Irv Smith, Jr. got into a scuffle. Battling heat and fatigue and each other, players sometimes fight. Saban didn’t blow a gasket over it, either.

He yelled to the scrum of guys trying to break the two up that this would be a penalty if it were an actual game. Eventually, everything subsided. It was a teachable moment for an Alabama football team that is yet to find its identity.

How far will a group of over 100 guys go to ensure they’re not on the outside looking in 2018? Do they have the “mental intensity” to push through when things aren’t going well? This is the hallmark of every great Saban team at Alabama, including the one that just won a national title.

The third episode of Training Days shows us the “warts and all” and Saban impresses upon his team what could be the rally cry for 2018:

"If you wanna be a beast, you gotta do what the beast do."

Stray Thoughts

• This was a nice Jalen/Tua episode, where we saw how strong the bond is between the two.
• Special Teams/Tight Ends coach Jeff Banks is essentially Diet Dr. Scott Cochran.
• Also loved getting to see Mack Wilson. Going to be a leader in 2018.
• Josh Casher getting some more love.
• Defensive line coach Craig Kuligowski’s response to Raekwon Davis’ leading question about the best d-lineman he’s coached in the SEC: Sheldon Richardson.
• How many of the guys do you think know “Yea Alabama!” now?

There is one more episode of Training Days before this excellent series ends.