This past off season has been littered with some bad-news landmines off the field for Nick Saban and the Alabama program. Over the past few weeks, three players have been arrested on charges ranging from domestic violence, to drunk driving and drug possession.
Over the weekend, Saban shares his thoughts on some of the bigger issues that led to the program dismissing two of those players, by using those situations as a sounding board for some bigger problems that we have as a society with our younger generation.
“They all think they have this illusion of choice,” Saban told AL.com. “Like 'I can do whatever I want to do'. And you kind of have a younger generation now that doesn’t always get told no, they don’t always get told this is exactly how you need to do it. So they have this illusion that they have all these choices.”
Then Saban got a little philosophical, and provided an interesting look at how he views the price you have to pay to be successful.
"But the fact of the matter is, is if you want to be good, you really don't have a lot of choices, because it takes what it takes. You have to do what you have to do to be successful. So you have to make choices and decisions to have the discipline and focus to the process of what you need to do to accomplish your goals."
"All these guys that think they have a lot of choices are really sadly mistaken. And I think, as we all have done with our own children, they learn these lessons of life as they get older, and sometimes the best way to learn is from the mistakes that you make, even though we all hate to see them have to make them. And we don't really condone them when they do."
Nearly everything he says there should ring true for a lot of coaches that work with our younger generation on a daily basis, and that's the kind of old school mentality that has helped Saban build Alabama back into the national powerhouse that it is today.