Alabama football panic meter -- Rating the Crimson Tide's most pressing issues

AUSTIN, Texas — Nick Saban vacillated between pride and frustration as he met with the media following Alabama's heart-stopping 20-19 win over Texas on Saturday afternoon.

In a cramped, windowless room inside Darrell K Royal Stadium, the Crimson Tide's often crotchety coach smiled and offered to help a cameraman who was struggling to set up his microphone stand. Then he proceeded to praise his team's resilience.

«You gotta say that's great from a competitive standpoint, I think it's great from a team character standpoint,» he said. «But if we're going to be the kind of team that we want to be, that we're capable of being, we're going to have to play better down in and down out.»

And this is where things started to get prickly because almost nothing aside from Alabama's grittiness seemed worthy of the No. 1-ranked team in college football. Remember, they were more than 20-point favorites entering the day. And that was before Texas' starting quarterback, Quinn Ewers, was knocked out of the game with a clavicle injury in the first quarter. Still, it took a last-second field goal to hold on and beat an unranked team.

When Saban got worked up — when he looked back on mistake after mistake — he punctuated his sentences by slapping at the plastic table he was seated in front of.

«When you're playing games like this, you have to focus on what's in front of you,» he said. «You can't worry about all the other stuff that's going on — what people say, what they say on ESPN, what you all [the media] say, how much you're favored in the game. You have to focus on what's in front of you. You're an offensive lineman, that's the guy you gotta block. If you're a receiver, that's the guy you gotta beat. If you're a quarterback, you gotta