Alabama: Blue-collar label fine with Bama

KNOXVILLE — Alabama’s players did not take offense to Nick Saban’s “blue-collar” description of their football team following last Saturday’s 29-9 win over Tennessee. Winning games by punishing opponents physically and playing with more intensity, as opposed to simply starting better athletes, is fine with the undefeated Tide.

“We take a lot of pride in it,” linebacker Rolando McClain said. “You have to. I think everybody feeds off of it.”

Saban expressed a wish for more skill players after the game and said his LSU teams could play poorly and still win because they started so much talent. No. 2 Alabama certainly isn’t devoid of elite players — McClain, left tackle Andre Smith and nose guard Terrence Cody are all NFL talents — but Saban’s national title squad at LSU was essentially a semi-pro team.

Three receivers on that 2003 team, Michael Clayton, Devery Henderson and Dwayne Bowe, are still in the NFL and a fourth, Skyler Green, is on a practice squad. Joseph Addai was one of the running backs. Corey Webster, LaRon Landry and Randall Gay were among the future NFL players on defense. Even quarterback Matt Mauck played briefly in the NFL.

At this point in the season five years ago, Saban’s LSU team was 7-1. This so-called blue-collar Alabama team, now two games ahead of this year’s Tigers, is still undefeated and holding off Penn State in the latest BCS standings.

“We play physical most of the time, and I think our intensity is certainly fueling our success,” said Saban, whose Alabama teams have outscored Tennessee 70-26 in their two wins. “When we have it, we’re pretty good because we are physical. We’re a blue-collar team.

“We’ve got a lot of good players, but when we don’t have our intensity and we don’t play with a sense of urgency, it doesn’t work out too well.”

For the first time since the season opener against Clemson, Saban said, his team played physical and with a sense of urgency for the entire game. Several Tennessee players limped to the sideline during the game. The Tide stymied Tennessee twice after special teams errors gave the Vols good field position. And in the third quarter, usually the start of a meltdown for Alabama, the Tide outscored Tennessee 9-0.

Even without the injured Cody, Alabama stuffed the Vols’ running game and continually harassed quarterback Nick Stephens.

“It looked like he didn’t know where the blitzes were coming from,” safety Rashad Johnson said.

It all helped Alabama to its first back-to-back wins of 20 points or more against Tennessee since 1974-75. Not bad for a blue-collar team.

“We accomplished something in terms of playing a complete game, and that’s something we’re going to have to do down the stretch on a consistent basis,” Saban said. “We’re going to have a lot of opportunities against a lot of good football teams to do that.”

Including one against LSU in two weeks. But that’s after Saturday’s Arkansas State game and didn’t concern Alabama’s players standing outside of the locker room on a chilly night in Knoxville, so they didn’t offer many comments.

“We don’t worry about external things at Alabama,” Alabama’s Javier Arenas said. “We worry about us.”