When Alabama football loses, the hot takes come out.

For the better part of Nick Saban’s 17 years in Tuscaloosa, a Crimson Tide defeat has usually triggered an assessment of UA’s dynasty and whether Saban is finally losing his grip. After the Tide dropped a brutal Week 2 game against Texas, the cycle repeated.

On Wednesday, Saban was asked about his approach when fans and pundits forecast the end of Alabama’s run of greatness.

“My approach is try to play to a standard, try to get our players to play to a standard. When we don’t play to a standard, I don’t need anybody else to criticize,” Saban said on the SEC coaches teleconference. ” … “My standard comes from within me, not from some external motivation that comes from someplace else. I haven’t even heard or read anything of those things because I don’t really pay a lot of attention to it. I do pay a lot of attention to what we’re doing here internally and how we can get it fixed so that our players have a better chance to be successful.”

Saban and his players have been asked, all week, to diagnose what happened in the 34-24 loss to the Longhorns, the worst home loss in Saban’s tenure. Some, like offensive lineman Tyler Booker, questioned the energy levels in practice, while Saban believed they prepared well for last Saturday and it showed early before faltering in the second half.

“So the focus is 100% on how we get it turned around,” Saban said on Monday. “The future is now. So how do we get our players to – we’ve got to do a better job as coaches to help them be able to play better, more consistently in the game. Put them in a position where they have the best chance to be successful. But I think all these things are fixable. I believe in our players, I think we’ve got good players. Texas has a good team and it’s like I said before, it was a test. It was an early test in the semester. We didn’t grade out very well in the test so what are we going to do to get a better grade.”

Alabama’s season-long goals — win the SEC West, capture the SEC championship, win the College Football Playoff — are all still attainable. It’ll try to correct the offensive and defensive inconsistencies starting this weekend at South Florida (2:30 p.m. on ABC).

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Nick Alvarez is a reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @nick_a_alvarez or email him at [email protected].