BATON ROUGE — On Monday afternoon at the LSU Athletic Administration Building, LSU head coach Nick Saban spoke to the media before his football team’s first game in three weeks.
LSU (2-0, 0-0 SEC) takes on Tennessee (2-0, 1-0 SEC) on Saturday evening at 6:45 CDT in a nationally televised contest on ESPN.
After the tragedies of Sept. 11, the Tigers’ home game with Auburn was moved to Dec. 1, leaving LSU without a football game for 21 days. The three-week break between games is the longest in the modern era of LSU football. The 1907 Tigers had a 25-day layoff between the final two games of the season.
Quotes from LSU head coach Nick Saban
“I know that these last few weeks have been difficult from everyone’s standpoint, but I also know that with some degree of difficulty, we tried to create some kind of balance with our team. We tried to figure out what the workload should be and what the repetitions should be in order to maintain the proper perspective and focus that we need to play in this game.
“We’ve been pleased with how the players have approached this game. They have all had really good attitudes and as you know we practiced Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday last week to work on fundamentals. Then we practiced on Saturday to start our preparation for Tennessee and we are already a little ahead of where we would normally be.
“This is a fine football team that we are playing. They have the best defense probably in the SEC up to this point, relative to their points allowed, their sacks, and that type of thing. They are an outstanding defensive team and they probably run the ball as effectively as anybody that we’ve played since I’ve been here.
“I think that the key to this game is that the most physical team will have the best chance to win. They (Tennessee) pride themselves on being that and it’s going to be a challenge for our team to see if we can go on the road and have the dominant attitude that we need to beat a talented team in their house.
“We’re nine-and-a-half point underdogs, so we obviously don’t have the respect that we should have in order to go in there and beat them. That’s something that we really have to prove and that’s something that is a challenge. In a great competition, you need to be a great competitor, and it’s always more fun to go into someone else’s place and be a dominant team and to win a game, than it is to win at home.
“That’s something that we have not experienced as a team and we need to continue to work on it, so that we can experience it. If we’re going to have success as a team, it is going to have to be something that we’ll have to be able to do.
“That’s the challenge that we have this week. We have a lot of proving to do and we have to prove that we have the maturity to play on the road. We have to prepare ourselves to play the sort of game that we need to play in order to be successful. We’re going to have to keep our focus in an environment that is going to try and do everything that it can to make us lose our focus.
“We really don’t have any players that you would consider to be questionable for the game at this point. We do have a few players that will be in red shirts (no contact jerseys) today; Jarvis Green, Kenderick Allen, and probably Robert Royal, but they are all just minor injuries. We’re using the extra time to help these guys heal up from some nagging injuries.
“Robert Davis did run last week and he is running okay, but I can’t say that he will be ready to play this week, and I can’t say that he won’t. He’s just taking it day-by-day right now, but I would be a little surprised if were able to play.
SABAN ON HAVING THREE WEEKS OFF BEFORE THE GAME
“It’s our goal to try and create some sort of balance between the workload, the focus and the preparation, because it is an unusual situation. I’ve been pleased with how both the team and the staff has managed it so far.
“We tried to change what our focus was. We didn’t look at it from the season standpoint, we just tried to give our players a purpose every day. We gave them something to look forward to that would make them better, especially in those first three days. We came back to practice after having three days off and the rest served its purpose, because it allowed them to get away from it all for awhile.
“I think it’s important to have balance, to be supportive and to let the players know that what they’re doing is important right now. That gets them through this long period of not having a game and gets them through not having the same routine or rhythm that they normally would at this point in the season.
“Tennessee’s in the same boat that we are, with them having a game postponed followed by a bye week. I don’t know for sure what the answers are to these questions. You can only learn these things through experience and this is an experience that we haven’t had to deal with in the past and I can’t even speculate on what the results will be.