With last weekend’s 24-21 win over Florida, LSU coach NickSaban said at his Tuesday press conference his team is on solidground going into this week’s open date.
“As someone said to me, we could have folded our tent andreally maybe we ended up building a house,” Saban said.”Hopefully it will be a strong house and something we canbuild on in the future. There were a lot of good things in the gameand there were obviously a lot of things that we could dobetter.”
Saban said the team seemed more relaxed this week.
“It seems like in the games we played hardest in —that those seem to be the games that we seemed to make the mostmental errors,” Saban said. “I think that emotion weplay with and the tenacity that we play with — we’vejust go to learn how to channel it in the rightdirection.”
Fifth-year senior quarterback Marcus Randall and running backJoseph Addai may have been the most obvious pick for players of theweek, but the offensive line played superbly in the Tigers’win, Saban said.
“Really the offensive line played the best by-farwe’ve played all year,” Saban said. “They did anoutstanding job to make a lot of those … five and eight yard runsthat were really significant.”
The Tigers showed killer instinct in their game against Florida,Saban said. The ability to come back in the game after threeturnovers and two missed field goals proved it, he said.
“When I define relentless for the players [I mean] thatyou invoke respect and fear through constant pressure that probablydescribes the way we played in the game more than anythingelse,” Saban said.
The Tigers will not play any ranked teams the last five games ofthe season, but the team cannot relax after the big win on theroad, Saban said.
“It’s important now that we can continue to build onthat and not be relieved that ‘Hey we did it,'”Saban said. “That was my question after everybody ran sprintstoday … did you really run hard today to try to get better or didyou say we just had a great win so I didn’t have to run quiteas hard today because I can take it easy now?”
Injuries: Wide receiver Skyler Green (ankle), defensive endMarcus Spears (leg), cornerback Travis Daniels (hand) and safetyLaRon Landry (hip) all sat out of Tuesday’s practice withminor injuries.
Saban said all four players would have practiced if LSU played agame this week.
Tigers’ linebacker Dorsett Buckels suffered a torn ACL inthe game on special teams, sidelining him for the season, Sabansaid.
Cornerback Corey Webster (knee) will not practice until later inthe week.
Saban said Webster could practice now, but wanted to give himextra time to recover because of the bye week.
Miscellaneous: Linebacker E.J. Kuale served a one-gamesuspension, and Saban said he does not intend to suspend him afteran off-campus altercation last week.
“I have no further information that says he needs topenalized or anything else,” Saban said. “I think theguy learned his lesson. He apologized to the team after thegame.
“His story is he went to pick up a friend … like he wasgoing on a good Samaritan cruise. But it was a bad time for him todecide to be a good Samaritan.”