The College Football Playoff’s expansion to 12 teams this year will lead to a new mindset in the sport, Nick Saban said Saturday.

Speaking on the set of ESPN’s College GameDay, Saban said one loss early in the season won’t necessarily derail a team’s playoff hopes in the new era. Teams might even be able to lose multiple teams and still make the playoff, he said.

“I think we’ve got to get out of this ‘losing one game’ mentality that we have in college athletics, because it’s not gonna be that way anymore,” Saban said. “I think the most important thing is, how do you self-assess as a coach?

“Do you do the things you need to do to get your team to play winning football if you do stumble early, and then how does each player on your team self-assess to know what individually they have to do to be able to contribute to the team playing winning football? If you can do that, you can improve.”

Saban cited his own Alabama team last year, which lost in Week 2 to Texas and then looked like anything but a playoff team in a sloppy win the next week vs. South Florida. By season’s end, the Crimson Tide was SEC champions.

Those kinds of in-season turnarounds will become more common in the 12-team era, he said.

“f you look at us last year, we play bad against Texas,” Saban said. “We barely beat South Florida; it was 10-7 in the fourth quarter. But we became a playoff team — and that’s with four teams. So with 12, you’re going to be able to lose two games — maybe three — and still be able to get in the playoffs. The bounceback factor to me and how coaches handle defeats, losses and wins are all going to contribute to whether they have a chance to psychologically recover.”

Saban said the poor performance in the win over South Florida might have had a more galvanizing effect on the 2023 Crimson Tide than did the loss to Texas the previous week.

“We know most people think that players respond better when you win to what you have to do to get better,” Saban said. “Players have a lot of pride. So, they actually respond better when you lose or when you don’t play well. Because they have pride in performance and they want to do better. Our team had the right disposition about trying to improve and trying to live up to the expectations that they had for themselves, as well as the fans had.”