Alabama Football: ESPN wrapped up ‘Training Days’ with Episode 4

The final installment of ESPN’s Training Days: Rolling with the Tide finds the Alabama football team in its final days of fall camp as it begins prep for Louisville.

The one motif ESPN’s four-part docu-series on the Alabama football program keeps coming back to time and again is Nick Saban talking to the team after practice. He always has a message of motivation: “how do you get better,” “mental intensity,” “be the beast,” etc.

In the opening moments of the final episode of Training Days, we begin to see the genesis of these platitudes. As Saban talks to the team, ESPN intercuts similar discussions the vast number of motivational speakers Saban acquires has with the players. Guys like Kobe Bryant, WBC Heavyweight champ (and Tuscaloosa native) Deontay Wilder and the like seem to have eerily similar messages to that of the Tide head coach.

We’re left to believe one of two things: 1) Saban apes the speakers’ messages, 2) Saban gives the speakers talking points and they say them to the team. Honestly, I’m not sure which is which.

This is definitely a Nick Saban episode

For the last two episodes of Training Days, Saban has been a bit player to his student-athletes and assistants. Since we rarely get to hear anything from but a few scant players and we almost never hear a peep out of his assistants due to his “one team, one voice” rule, ESPN made sure to, at the very least, give them some screen time.

The final installment of this series, though, finds itself back in the waiting arms of the head man because he’s the one, in the end, that it all falls to. Do you really need to ask why Alabama football is the way it is right now?

What’s fun about this episode is we finally get to see him interact with the players, especially the secondary. We’re treated to him throwing his famous straw hat out of anger a couple of times (that yell, by the way, can peel the paint off a barge), but we also get to see him teach. He says several times throughout the episode that he loves being hands-on with the team because that’s where relationships are formed.

Does anyone get a sense that he’s subliminally telling recruits, “I’m not all that bad”?

He’ll yell, he’ll gesticulate wildly when something goes wrong, but it’s only because he’s a mad perfectionist. Practice is the absolute zone for him and things need to be kept on track. A screw-up or “loafing” puts things off track. This gets to the core of his psyche and, like Norman Bates, “he goes a little mad sometimes.”

You want your championships, you gotta take a pinch of sugar with a spoonful of dirt.

Louisville is here

Which means so is the season, people!

There seems to be some urgency in this final episode as the Alabama football team nears the end of fall camp and begins prep for Louisville. The cameras, of course, won’t be there for that because why not just hand the Bobby Petrino the playbook?

The players begin classes, most of the upperclassmen are back at their homes off campus and coaches are making scouting reports. The college football season is nigh.

Members of the secondary are highlighted having some fun before game week and they probably should. They have the head coach on their butts for two hours every day. I know I’d turn to the damn bottle.

Most of us have a sense of how the game on Saturday will go. While I never think it’s as easy as 52-0, Louisville is a 25-point underdog and for good reason. Still, Saban’s message to the team is always to motivate. He brings up the fact that Cardinals’ players and coaches have been talking some stuff and how his team responds to that will help create its identity.

Stray Observations

• Always nice to see 90-year-old Eddie Conyers, the team referee since 1962, get some love. Greg McElroy points out that there’s one guy in the entire world who knows if “Bear” Bryant or Nick Saban is the better coach. There’s a documentary for you.
• Totally forgot that the players have GPS systems in their shoulder pads.
• Love to see Saban coaching up punt returns. Seeing him give Trevon Diggs some grief for never playing baseball beyond t-ball is a treasure of a moment for the known curmudgeon.
• Anfernee and Terrell make me cry a whole bunch.
• My wife laughed for a solid 60 seconds when Jonah Williams said his cheesy bread is similar to a pizza chain that starts with a “D” and rhymes with “Rominoes”
• Saban may never yawn, but he definitely has difficulty with names: anyone hear him say “Kirby Bryant”? Freudian slip, perhaps?

Most likely, Training Days will have done its primary job: to get the best high school talent onto Alabama’s campus. That’s why Saban okay’d the project, to begin with.

However, the series’ ability to find control and beauty within the chaotic machine that is the Alabama football program is what makes it a success. Yes, it could’ve dug deeper like Last Chance U, but when you’re at the top year in and year out, there’s not too much to be unhappy about.