Saturday’s matchup against Chattanooga will be Alabama football’s final home game of the season, and senior day for some of the Crimson Tide’s older players. During his Monday press conference, head coach Nick Saban was asked what it means to have players who have stuck around the program in the transfer portal era.

In his answer, Saban got animated discussing the attitudes of young players.

“We’ve got all these freshmen who want to play as freshmen,” Saban said. And we’ve had, I don’t know, you can count them up— How many guys go out early for the draft? So if it’s 45 guys, I don’t know if that’s the right number or not, I’ve had 32 phone calls times 45, whatever that number is. In the thousands, right? I’ve never been asked once how much a guy played as a freshman. Never. Not once. Everybody wants to know, what did you develop into?”

This year’s group of seniors includes players who have risen from the bench into starting roles later in their careers, like center Seth McLaughlin and edge rusher Chris Braswell. Saban also pointed to former quarterback Mac Jones as someone who didn’t see the field until late, but still was able to build himself into an NFL Draft pick.

“I think that one of the big things that we try to get guys to understand is, we have good players on our team,” Saban says.”So you’re going to have a better chance to develop because the competition in practice is actually going to be beneficial to your development. And I think that if guys can stay focused on long term in terms of what they’re trying to develop and improve.”

McLaughlin saw his first meaningful snaps in 2021, as a sophomore. He was thrown into action against Auburn to end the regular season, before getting his first start in the SEC championship game against Georgia.

Speaking Monday, he discussed how far he came since entering the program.

“Playing at Alabama has been an incredible blessing for me, just personally and football-wise,” McLaughlin said. “A lot of hard work has gone into it. It’s the biggest blessing that I’ve ever had. I’m super thankful for coach Saban believing in an undersized, 6-3, 260-pound center from Buford, Georgia, all those years ago. Coming in as the lowest-ranked recruit in the class, it’s meant a lot to me to put the work in and show people that through hard work, you can play here and play at a high level.”

According to Saban, too many players come in expecting to get significant playing time as freshmen.

“That expectation gets created by a lot of external factors too,” Not to put any of the blame on (reporters), or anybody that says a guy’s a five-star and he should make this immediate impact and all this stuff. So that becomes the expectation. So whenever it doesn’t happen, a guy’s frustrated. I get that. I understand that.”

“We’ve got to try to get guys to be able to stay focused on what they have to do to develop as players, make improvement so that when they do play, they create value for themselves. Rather than worrying about just playing. But if you go out there and don’t play well, what kind of value are you creating for yourself?”