Alabama Crimson Tide College Football Pregame Quote, 12/28/2021

If you would, give us an opening statement about your thoughts about Friday’s game.

My thoughts about the game, it’s one of those moments, playing on the big stage. Cincinnati is going to come out, they’re going to come out fired up with something to prove. And just got to make sure our team is well-prepared and ready to go come Friday.

You’ve been through a number of these games during your career at Alabama. How have you learned to prepare maybe from your freshman year to now an upper classman on how to prepare for playoff games of this magnitude?

Out of the five years I’ve been here, this is my fourth playoff experience. So that’s multiple years just playing, playing at this time of the year, preparing for games like this.

So after four years of playing in the playoffs, I just have a lot of experience of practicing and just preparing for big games such as the one we’ve got coming up.

So it’s nothing new to me. Same routine. Just got to come, prepare as hard as we can, as hard as we’ve prepared all season at this moment right now.

I wanted to ask you, how do you kind of grade your guys’ running game this year? You guys have had a lot of injuries in the running back corps. And I just wanted to get a feel for how you think that area has performed.

In our running game, I think we’ve improved tremendously throughout the season. We’ve had lots of ups and downs with guys, injuries at all positions. Offensive linemen kind of having to move around a lot, play different positions.

And the running back depth, just having a few guys not with us to finish out the season, we had to make a lot of adjustments as a team, as an offensive unit, to help our running game. And I feel like we’ve improved a lot.

Do you have a hunch on how big a role the running game might have in this game, given ‚Äì it seems like so much attention is put on the passing game and the Cincinnati pass defense and so forth. It doesn’t seem like a lot of people are talking about the running game. I guess, how do you think it might figure into things here?

The running game will always be important in big games like this. You need to stay balanced in the running game in order to open up more in the passing game. I’m sure many people might not understand that part of it, but the running game has to work and it has to be a key factor in our game in order for it to open up the passing game for us.

Just wanted to ask you a little bit about playing for Coach [Bill] O’Brien. Obviously, in your four years you’ve had a handful of offensive coordinators. Sark [Steve Sarkisian] to O’Brien. Sark is different. Just how different is he? And obviously coming from the NFL background coaching with the Houston Texans, coaching with Tom Brady in his time at New England, how has he helped you improve as a running back?

Coach O’Brien has helped me improve a lot as a running back, the way he likes to do things from his experience from coaching in the NFL. He’s just bringing that into our offense and helping me understand the game a lot more, better as far as how I should understand it at the next level. He’s been so great with just helping us to continue to learn, especially like new things that we’ll continue to have to learn at the next level.

A quick follow-up about Bryce [Young]. Obviously he seems so incredibly poised and a very humble kid. Is there something about Bryce Young that we in the media or fans at home don’t know. Is he funny? Does he do anything in the locker room? Does he cut up? Give us a sneak peek behind the curtain of something Bryce does to add to the locker room dynamic.

Everybody sees Bryce as poised, a humble guy. I see that, too, with how he handles his business when it’s time to practice or when it’s time to step on the field for a game.

But I see Bryce being himself sometimes when he listens to his favorite music and he’s rapping his favorite lyrics and stuff like that. Just watching him be himself sometimes. He’s human just like us. He likes to have a good time, too, even though many people might not be able to see it. When he’s on the field, it’s just a different side of him.

I wanted to follow up on that question about Coach [Bill] O’Brien. I mean, how different was it for you guys on that side of the ball to not have him present and kind of dealing with you guys over Zoom here the last few days?

I mean, with him not being here, it’s nothing new. He is still doing his job. He’s on Zoom. He makes sure he coaches the same way. With him not being present, it just is more on the players. We had to come out to practice and be prepared to practice hard, even with us not having Coach present. We still know we have got to do everything at a certain pace and a certain speed that he would want us to do it at, whether he is there or not.

A lot of defensive players yesterday were asked and talked about the Texas A&M game being the turning point for this team. You haven’t lost a lot since you’ve been in Tuscaloosa. How was this year perhaps different in terms of what you guys did as a unit to improve going forward to not lose since that time?

We just looked at the film, and we just had to find ourselves again. And we never want to feel that hurt again. So we take that to the weight room, we take that to the practice field, we take that to the film room and continue to get better so we don’t make the same mistakes we made to lose that first game.