22 Quotes From Alabama Head Coach Nick Saban On Being A Leader

https://youtu.be/wlHAVQtuxKg

Are you ready for some football?  Absolutely!!!  On Wednesday, July 19th Alabama Crimson Tide head football coach Nick Saban appeared on ESPN’s First Take (see video above).  Winner of five national championships and four in the last seven years, Coach Saban is a wealth of knowledge regarding the subject of leadership.  He is arguably the greatest coach in this history of college football.

Coach Saban discussed a myriad of topics including complacency, the value of competition, and the team’s battle for starting quarterback.

The following are 22 Quotes And Lessons From Alabama head coach Nick Saban:

1. You try to avoid complacency.  When you have success, people think I’m supposed to get some time off…They start to resent the hard work.  They start to question some of the principles and values that helped them become successful.
2. Complacency, which creates a blatant disregard for doing things correctly, which is very important if you want to have success.
3. The off-season is a work in progress.
4. Losing to Ole Miss (last season) is probably the one thing that helped us the most to continue to develop the kind of team chemistry we needed.
5. What we’re most concerned about is the well-being of our players.
6. “Win the team.”  You win the players over (as a quarterback) by your performance, your ability to play with some consistency, (and) to execute.  They develop confidence in you.  You develop confidence in them and that’s where the chemistry comes from that’s necessary to score points and execute in a consistent fashion.
7. You find when you play a good opponent early, “Where are we?”
8. The quarterback doesn’t always have to win the game for us.
9. The most important thing when you have a quarterback battle is quarterbacks focus on what they need to do and not what the other guy is doing.

The following are 13 additional quotes from Coach Saban’s appearance on SportsCenter earlier in the day:

1. When you come off a vacation, you’ve had enough golf, you’ve have enough rest time, I’ve got to get back to being the boss.
2. We’ve just become the target.  When you win the championship everybody circles that game on your schedule and you get everybody’s best game.  You have to prepare yourself to be ready for that.
3. We don’t want our quarterback to feel he has to win the game.  You don’t him to feel like you have to force things to win the game.  If you execute with the players around you and do your job, and make good choices, we’re going to have a chance to be successful.
4. Every team has to develop their own identity, their own personality, and that gets done by everybody accepting their role to make this team better.
5. You’ve got to forget about the past and focus on what’s happening in the future.
6. Regardless of your circumstance, you have some expectation for what you want to try to accomplish.
7. You have to focus on the things you need to do to accomplish the goals you have rather than the expectation.  The expectation can create a tremendous amount of anxiety and a loss of focus on the things you need to do to have the success.
8. The key to what we try to do is get our players to have the discipline to execute the things they need to do to accomplish the goals they have.  This gets hard to do because of external circumstances.
9. I probably get more (enjoyment) when I see a player have success.
10. A 60-10 game.  You play the (championship) game for 60 minutes and the 10 minutes after the game define something you remember for the rest of your life.
11. I don’t know if we did anything to help him (new Georgia head coach and former Alabama assistant Kirby Smart) but I know he did a lot to help us.
12. I think it’s very, very important that everybody on our team understands that we have a responsibility and obligation to be someone that someone can emulate.  Do positive things that create value for you as a person.
13. To show that you care is a big part of being a leader which means you’re willing to help someone else.

For more from this incredible leader and other top college coaches, click the following:

• 58 Leadership Quotes From Nick Saban On Winning From Leadercast
• Comparing And Contrasting Nick Saban And Dabo Swinney’s Leadership Styles
• 21 Practices Of Leaders Like Nick Saban And Urban Meyer Who Perform At The Highest Level

For more leadership insights from Coach Saban, click HERE or on the image to the left for my new ebook The Leadership Of Nick Saban: Timeless Truths From The Incomparable Head Coach Of The Alabama Crimson Tide.  Enjoy!