Rolando McClain didn’t mind being the bad guy.
Stepping out of a cramped locker room in a hostile SEC stadium splashed gas on an already-famously combustible mindset. Fourteen years after one particular trip to LSU evokes vivid memories of a rocking bus pulling into the stadium and the live tiger waiting at the locker room door.
People are also reading… “We used to play better on the road than what we played at home,” Saban said Sept. 15 after a 20-19 win at unranked Texas. “Because we had some hateful competitors on our team and when they played on the road, they were mad at 100,000 people and not the 11 guys they were playing against. And they wanted to prove something to everybody.”
And from 2015-20, the Crimson Tide went 23-2 in opposing stadiums. Only Auburn in 2017 and 2019 kept Alabama from a perfect run in that six-year span that overlapped with linebacker Christian Miller’s career. Another factor in that era spanning from Saban’s arrival until 2020 was then-strength and conditioning coach Scott Cochran. No slight was too minor for Cochran to spotlight with signs plastered around the football complex.
Like McClain, Miller recalls the most specific details of pregame instigation. In 2015, Alabama traveled to Georgia for a top-10 showdown that came with a scuffle during warmups. The boos rained just as hard as hurricane remnants that soaked Sanford Stadium that afternoon. And three years later, pregame bluster at LSU included Tiger players whipping 100,000-plus into a pre-kickoff frenzy.
Docile decibel meters were the goal. In a way, Miller said he preferred road games to afternoons in Bryant-Denny simply because of the satisfaction they got from emptying stadiums in the second half.“Just the fact that the crowd is always hyped and then you can sense the energy change as you keep beating them,” Lewis said in 2019. “They’re loud, loud, loud and then you start to see people get quiet and you start to see people leave. It’s fun, because you know you dominated your opponent.