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.
The alpha linebacker from Nick Saban’s first Crimson Tide act embraced the target Alabama carried to places like Baton Rouge, Fayetteville and Oxford.
And when Nick Saban used his radio show to reminisce about previous generations of “hateful competitors” he’d like this group to emulate, it’s hard to imagine McClain outside that list. There’s been something intangible missing from several road games the past few years – whether narrow escapes at Florida, Auburn and Texas or a loss at Texas A&M.
“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.”
Just winning was good enough, Saban observed as the current mentality, one that’s shifted from the days of McClain and continued through the likes of Reuben Foster, Ryan Anderson and A’Shawn Robinson.
Alabama won, but unlike Saban’s early-Alabama mantra, made nobody’s ass quit.
“When the competition got hot, we wanted to be in the fire,” McClain said in a recent phone interview with AL.com. “So that’s what made us, us.”
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In the two weeks since Saban’s hateful competitor remark, current players have faced questions about where they fall on the antagonist spectrum. Nearly everyone said the needle was in the red, but the next three weeks will put that meddle to the test. It’ll travel to face ranked teams Arkansas and Tennessee, neither of whom have a win over Alabama since 2006, but both figure to have the best shot in years to snap those skids. Neither stadium is known for hospitality on bad years so Saturday’s trip to Fayetteville and the Oct. 15 game in Knoxville figure to be absolutely snake pits.
“Yeah,” McClain recalled, “Arkansas was crazy.”
Alabama won all eight true road games in McClain’s sophomore and junior seasons.
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.
Saban didn’t need colorful adjectives to assess the level of road hatred for those teams. Miller, now a sideline reporter on Alabama football radio broadcasts, said teammates like Foster, Ronnie Harrison and Jonathan Allen set the tone in the locker room. He said they embraced the villain role, built more on action than words.
“It was more of an attitude ‘We are Alabama,’” Miller said recently, “‘and by the time we leave here, you’re going to know why we’re Alabama.’”
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.
Vanderbilt’s Nifae Lealao “Alabama, you’re next” proclamation before a 2017 trip to Nashville ended with a 59-0 Crimson Tide win.
“I heard one of the guys say a word like he didn’t even want to play anymore,” Alabama running back Bo Scarbrough said afterward. “But we wanted to keep our foot on the pedal and keep gassing them on every play and every down.”
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.
“I was like ‘who do they think they are?’” Miller recalls. “We’re about to play.’ Next thing you know, crickets.”
That night in Baton Rouge ended with a 29-0 Alabama over No. 6 LSU, equally convincing as the 38-10 pounding of No. 8 Georgia in 2015.
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.
Terrell Lewis, a former linebacker teammate who played at Alabama from 2016-19, agreed.
“Just the fact that the crowd is always hype 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.”
A’Shawn Robinson, an Alabama defensive lineman from 2013-15, took it a step further.
“It’s a dog-eat-dog world, so in our mind we’re trying to feast,” Robinson said in 2015. “It’s like a pack of wolves out there on the line, and we’re just trying to go out there and dominate and get after whoever is back there. In our mindset, we see blood, and we try and get the blood.”
The question of how that mentality translates to 2022 remains. McClain’s been away from the program long enough that he said it’s hard to say if this generation has that same intangible.
Miller had a front-row view of the last two home games on the Alabama radio crew and he chuckled discussing his perspective.
“It’s definitely a different kind of group, whether it’s a new generation of kids coming up. I know I’m not that old to say something like that,” said Miller, 26, who finished his Alabama career in 2018, “but realistically it is a little bit different between NIL and social media, things are just a little bit different. But these guys have it.”
He said he sees it in leaders like Bryce Young and Will Anderson.
“I just think it’s a matter of getting the rest of the guys around them to get that attitude and swagger about them to say ‘Hey, we’re Alabama football. There’s a standard we have to live up to.’ And they’re more than capable of doing that,” Miller said.
Any discussion of (relatively) old school versus the current generation doesn’t include Anderson. Like locker room enforcers McClain and Co., Anderson publicly called out teammates who weren’t dialed in before games at Florida and Texas A&M last year. It was a lack of focus, Anderson said, that hindered preparation in recent less-than-dominant business trips.
Anderson also has Robinson’s gift of artistically describing his competitive hatred.
“I tell people all the time, the audacity for the other team to even step on the field is disrespectful to me,” Anderson said. “I tell people that all the time. People ask me what motivates me. I say, the audacity for the fans to show up and for the team to come to step on the field and play with us. That’s kind of my own little thing in my head that I go through.”
Safety Jordan Battle said, as a whole, this Alabama team is “not at that level right now.”
“We’re trying to get back to that standard,” Battle said. “He likes to see the stadium empty. I remember that feeling last year after we lost to Texas A&M. Then we went to play Mississippi State after that, and we put that beating on them and I saw (Saban) smiling toward the end of the game when Mississippi State’s crowd got up and started leaving.”
Saban was proud of the response to the 41-38 loss at Texas A&M that began with the 49-9 physical pounding in Starkville.
“That made him very happy,” Battle said. “Getting back to that defense and trying to see coach happy like that, that’s what we need to get back to.”
Whether McClain would use the word “hateful” to describe his generation’s mindset is a game of semantics.
“Hateful?” McClain said, “If that’s how he felt …”
For Miller entering Arkansas week, he remembers the 2016 trip to Fayetteville. Alabama won, 46-30, but players like Marlon Humphrey looked dejected given the dominance deficiency.
Just winning wasn’t enough that night.
And with the legacy comes a degree of pressure Miller said is hard to understand unless you’re in that Alabama locker room. Sustaining that edge of an apex hateful competitor, he said, is one of the challenges unique to this program.
“It’s unfortunate,” Miller said, “but it’s a good problem that the standard is so high.”
Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.
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