Saban takes blame for botched fake field goal
SANTA CLARA, Calif. — Alabama Crimson Tide coach Nick Saban blamed himself for choosing to run a fake field goal instead of settling for a 39-yard attempt early in the third quarter, a busted play that proved momentous in a 28-point loss to Clemson Tigers in the national championship game Monday night.
Three plays after Clemson snuffed out the Crimson Tide’s fake field goal attempt, Tigers quarterback Trevor Lawrence connected with Justyn Ross for a 74-yard touchdown that pushed their lead to 22 points and effectively ended most hopes of an Alabama rally.
“We thought we had a really, really good fake, and somebody didn’t block a guy they were supposed to block, and so it didn’t work,” Saban said. “So it was a bad call. It’s always that way.”
Trevor Lawrence passed for 347 yards and three touchdowns and No. 2 Clemson rolled No. 1 Alabama 44-16 on Monday night in the College Football Playoff national championship game.
During Monday night’s title game, Alabama opened as the +150 favorite to bring home the championship in 2020 — but those odds shifted by the end of the night, with the Tigers emerging as +180 favorites following their dominant win over the Tide.
Trailing 31-16 at the start of the second half, Alabama went 51 yards in 12 plays before its drive stalled out at the Clemson 22. The Tide’s field goal team then got into formation for the kick.
But Mac Jones, the holder and a backup quarterback, held the ball and allowed kicker Joseph Bulovas to run past him as a lead blocker. Then Jones took off behind him but was met in the backfield by Clemson defensive tackle Nyles Pinckney, who slipped away from two blockers and brought Jones down for a loss of 2 yards.
“We just needed 6 yards and the guy squirted through and got me so you can’t do much about that,” Jones said. “But that’s pretty much what it was.”
At that point in the game, it was the fourth time the Crimson Tide tried to convert a fourth down. That was the first one that came up short.
“We’d been running it in practice a lot and we were going to run it if we had the right look and we got the look that we wanted,” Bulovas said. “We were down by a couple scores at that time so we were trying to create a spark in the first place.”
Instead the play gave more life to the Tigers, who quickly seized on the mistake and used it to build — at the time — the biggest lead against any team at Alabama coached by Saban.