By Chris Macaluso
LSUsports.net
The eternal optimists will always say that every dark cloud has a silver lining.
First-year LSU head football coach Nick Saban may be an eternal optimist.
Saban, amongst the criticisms and the jeers of his team in the wake of LSU’s 13-10 loss to Alabama-Birmingham Saturday night, took time to consider the positives his team can take away from its performance.
“Every negative has a silver lining of some kind you can learn from,” Saban said. “But you have to have the right disposition about trying to learn from it.”
Saban said the first thing his team must learn from are the mental errors that contributed to poor play. The Tigers committed 13 penalties Saturday night for a total of 113 yards. LSU also dropped several passes which could have made a difference in field position and possibly led more points scored for the LSU offense. Saban said making sure his team catches the passes and doesn’t commit the penalties in its next game is what he’s most concerned with.
“I feel bad for the players,” he said. “It’s something that’s a little embarrassing for you. But you have to be a bigger man about it. You have to learn from your mistakes.”
LSU seemed to learn from some of its mistakes when it took the field in the second half. After compiling just 91 yards of total offense in the first half and scoring no points, the Tigers seemed to get on track early in the second. LSU recovered a fumbled punt deep in UAB territory early in the third quarter. Runs of five and nine yards by LSU tailback LaBrandon Toefield put the Tigers in scoring range quickly. But Tiger QB Josh Booty had his pass batted and intercepted by safety Adrian Singletary on first and goal, and LSU was seemingly back where it had started.
Booty led the Tigers on drives throughout the second half, including one for a touchdown with just over three minutes left in the third quarter and another for a field goal to tie the score 10-10 with 10:33 left to play.
But in the end, it was an interception of a Booty pass with less than a minute to play that led to the winning field goal by UAB kicker Rhett Gallego as time expired. Toefield said the game should have never reached that conclusion.
“We knew that they(UAB) were going to come out and play hard and we knew that we were going to have a fight on our hand because they had a very good defense,” he said. “They did the things that they needed to do and we didn’t. We played hard but we had a lot of mental errors. If you play hard and do the right things to win, you’re not going to win.”
The Tigers did play hard in the second half, holding the Blazers to just 57 total offensive yards. Meanwhile, LSU’s offense made up for its slow first start by finishing with 263 total yards, more than doubling it’s first-half total.
But, Saban said it means nothing to out-gain an opponent if the effort is squandered by not scoring.
“We had far too many penalties,” he said. “We had the ball three times in the red zone and didn’t get any points out of it at all. We dropped a lot of footballs and gave up field position time and time again because of penalties.”
Saban said losing the game was tough for his team, but the players have to put it behind them and get ready to play a tough conference game against Tennessee next week.
“There’s nobody who hates to lose more than me,” he said. “But I hate to see the kids have to lose. If we’re going to be a good football team, we’re going to need to start executing a whole lot better than what we did out there tonight.”