With the college football season just days away, Nick Saban was back on the airwaves speaking on the Hey Coach radio show on Thursday.

Saban covered a litany of topics during his weekly radio show beginning with the revamped offensive line and how he's pleased with the progress the group has made.

Alabama's offensive line struggled in 2021 allowing 42 sacks, which was 120th in the nation and was the worst in the Saban era. As a result, the Crimson Tide hired Eric Wolford to revamp the offensive line and to help add more consistency to the unit.

"His energy and enthusiasm have really been helpful to the entire offensive staff," Saban said. "His input is fantastic in terms of we have more diversity in the running game. I think our players have a better understanding of past protections and what we need to do to get people blocked up front. I think it's created a lot of confidence in the offensive line and the whole offensive team. He's done a fantastic job.

"I know (Bill O'Brien) feels a lot more comfortable with the input that we've we've had from, you know, formation standpoint how we're going to run the ball differently, not just running zone plays all the time, but have some different ways to run it. Have some play-action passes that go with it."

Along with bolstering the run game, the Crimson Tide had issues scoring inside the red zone at certain times last season. Despite having a red zone efficiency rating of more than 90%, in games against Texas A&M and Georgia costly turnovers along with settling for field goals rather than scoring a touchdown, hurt the Crimson Tide.

Saban said he hopes to see an improvement in that area coming into this season.

"We didn't have a big guy like (Terrence) Cody or an A'Shawn Robinson or somebody like that, that we were using a situation like that," Saban said. "There could be the possibility that we have some guys that we can do that with this year. But when we got into big people last year, we got stuffed. I agree we should be able to gain two yards we ought to be able to do that, and we've been stuffed too much lately."

The Crimson Tide's matchup with Utah State may be the ideal opportunity to work on establishing a dominant run game. The Aggies allowed 266 rushing yards against a UConn team that tallied 1,603 rushing yards last season.

Despite the come-from-behind win against the Huskies, Saban praised the Aggies and head coach Blake Anderson for leading the program to an 11-win season and a bowl victory over Oregon State.

"They won their conference," Saban said. "They've got seven starters back on both sides. They got the quarterback back and they run kind of Baylor-style offense which is a little probably as close to Tennessee probably as anybody that we play if you want to refer to something so and they spread you out and they do a good job of making the defense declare itself and they've been very, very successful scoring a lot of points. ... I think the rat poison this year, not to bring up a sore subject. I mean, it's worse than ever. I mean, I've had more people ask me, How are we going to do against Texas this week? Then how are we going to do against Utah State?"

Saban added to his famous "rat poison" comment stating that Alabama fans need to have "the energy and enthusiasm to support the players."

In other words, don't ask the head coach about Texas or any other team Alabama is not currently playing during the week.

"I read about 'How Alabama can run the table?'" Saban said. "I mean, can't you figure out something better to do than that? I mean, come on. We got to play one game at a time. I'm so how can Alabama lose to this team? How can this team beat Alabama three months from now? Who gives a shit?"