Last week the Crimson Tide opened its season with a 38-19 victory over the Missouri Tigers on the road. Alabama head coach Nick Saban has expressed disappointment in the way his team finished its first SEC game of this altered season.

The Crimson Tide commanded a 35-3 lead mid-way through the third quarter but allowed the Tigers to finish the game on a 16-3 run in the final 24 minutes of the game.

Saban spoke to the media in the Naylor Stone Media Room ahead of this week's game with No. 13 Texas A&M and his message centered around finishing the game properly and playing a full 60-minute game.

"You can always ask yourself, 'What if?' You can ask yourself, 'What if I'm play with discipline? What if I dominate the guy? What if I play hard for 60 minutes? What if I maintain intensity?' Those are all questions that you ask yourself before something happens," said Nick Saban. "And then you can say, 'Only if,' and that's what you ask yourself after it happens. You know, 'Only if I had done this, only if I'd prepared better, only if I had to play for 60 minutes.' So I think those are all lessons that we're trying to get our players to understand that you got to pay the price for success up front."

Saban was critical of himself when speaking to the media saying he left the Missouri game feeling as if he had not prepared the team well enough to finish the game on the right note.

"I came home and felt really bad that I must've done a really, really bad job not in getting the players ready to play the game, but maintaining their intensity throughout the game and doing a good job at halftime of trying to get them to come out and maintain the energy that they needed to maintain to be able to play for 60 minutes in the game [and] not thinking that -- hey, looking at the scoreboard, we always say that there's no scoreboard," said Saban.

The Crimson Tide plays at 2:30 on Saturday in its first home game of the season. There will be a little less than 20,000 fans in attendance at Bryant-Denny due to the current COVID-19 health and safety protocols.

The game can be seen on CBS or heard right here on Tide 100.9 FM.

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