It’s SEC Media Days, and UCF was mentioned. Here’s what Alabama’s Nick Saban said
Even at this week’s SEC Media Days, a program without any Power 5 conference affiliation — let alone the SEC — was mentioned during last year’s national champion’s turn at the podium.
The University of Central Florida was mentioned in Wednesday’s session involving Alabama.
The two programs made no secret about who was last season’s national champs with various social media jabs at each other following the 2017-18 season. UCF went undefeated, claimed a national title as the only undefeated program and even threw a parade, received championship rings and unveiled a title banner at its stadium.
Alabama was crowned national champs by winning the College Football Playoff with an overtime victory against Georgia.
On Wednesday, Alabama coach Nick Saban answered a question regarding UCF and the college football playoff.
“I have a tremendous amount of compassion for UCF and what they accomplished this year in going undefeated,” Saban said. “We’ve only had one team that’s gone undefeated and won the national championship, and that was in 2009. That is very, very, very difficult to do for anyone. I have a tremendous amount of respect for the players. I’m not responsible for this system that determines who gets in the playoffs, but I think they did a good job of determining who got into the playoff.”
“Now, we can have another discussion about the future of the playoffs, how many teams should get into the playoffs, but you’re going to minimize the effect of bowl games, which I stood up here 10 years ago and said, ‘As soon as we do this, it’s going to diminish the importance of bowl games. Everybody would just be interested in the playoff.’ Well, that’s where we are right now.”
“We have players choosing not to play in bowl games because it’s not important because they’re going to save themselves for the draft. All of these things are not good for college football. There’s a lot of philosophical questions that everybody needs to sort of take into consideration as far as the best way to do this whole thing is. I don’t think I have the answer to that. That’s not what I get paid to do. I can’t tell you how or why or if they should have gotten in the playoffs.”
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This story was originally published July 18, 2018 at 2:51 PM with the headline "It’s SEC Media Days, and UCF was mentioned. Here’s what Alabama’s Nick Saban said."