“Reverse Rat Poison” – Nick Saban Picks Texas & Georgia To Play In SEC Championship Game (To Fire Up Alabama)

Though Nick Saban no longer coaches the Crimson Tide, he's still finding ways to fire them up. It'll be weird not seeing the 7-time National Championship winning coach on the sideline this season when football fires back up , but he's not going away entirely. Saban retired as head coach - shockingly and suddenly might I add - and directly pivoted into the media side of college football. Turn on your TV on Saturday mornings and you'll see Saban on ESPN's cornerstone show College GameDay . That's actually why Saban and Pat McAfee are out in Ireland right now, because tomorrow (can you believe it?), College GameDay will be live from Ireland where Georgia Tech is taking on Florida State. Two teams that are usually a bus drive away from one another decided to travel almost 4,000 miles for their matchup that will kick the college football season off. Because FOOTBALL. As McAfee often does when he travels to wherever College GameDay is broadcasting from, he took his show to Ireland and is doing The Pat McAfee Show from an Irish pub. And he somehow got Nick Saban to drop in and give his thoughts on the upcoming SEC season. Saban made headlines recently when he didn't pick Alabama to win the SEC Championship, or to even make the championship game. The Pat McAfee Show asked him about that, and he clarified that his prediction might not have directly reflected how he thought things would shake out in the SEC for Bama: "Well, it's kind of reverse rat poison. I always hated it, and I'm gonna hate it on this show so I might as well say it right off the bat. This show or any show or College GameDay... having to predict and make hypothetical decisions about who's going to win a game, who's going to win a championship, who's gonna win what conference. I've always hated that." Saban is talking about that more from a former coach perspective, and now that he's on the other side of things and he's actually the one making the predictions, the longtime Crimson Tide coach decided to pick against his former teammate for reasons that should only benefit them in the long run: "I picked Georgia and Texas because its reverse rat poison for Alabama. It's a motivating factor for them not to get picked because I hated to be picked first or second because you don't know how that's going to impact your team. Psychologically, these kids are affected a lot by what they read, what they hear, what they see. So I didn't want to say anything too good (about Alabama)." Nick Saban... always playing chess when everyone else is playing checkers. https://twitter.com/PatMcAfeeShow/status/1827020516827279522