Practice Report: Alabama Football Forced Indoors As Prep Continues for Mississippi State

Alabama was forced to move indoors due to rainy conditions for its second full-padded practice of the week leading up to Saturday's game against Mississippi State

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Due to rainy conditions, the University of Alabama football team was forced to moved practice indoors to the Hank Crisp Indoor Facility on Wednesday afternoon, continuing preparations for its Saturday night meeting with Mississippi State. 

It was the second full-padded practice of the week. The high was 77 degrees and the whole city of Tuscaloosa was in a tropical storm warning due to Hurricane Zeta. 

"I really think it's important this time of year for players to choose energy," Saban said in his opening statement on Wednesday. "And then I think when you choose energy your feelings follow. When I think you put your feelings first, I don't think there's any football players in the country anywhere in any league that when you get halfway through the season and you've had five difficult games against good opponents, that people feel great.

"So when you put your feelings first, then your energy level's not going to be what it needs to be for you to practice and prepare and to improve and do things like you need to do it. So that's certainly a challenge for us. This time of year, you don't want to have self-pity. What this team has done to this point, they've put themselves in a position to have a chance to be successful. And we want to be able to build on that. But everybody's got to have the right mind-set to do that and you've got to believe in practice and preparation to be able to do that."

An emphasis on practice all week has been how to slow down Mike Leach's Air Raid offense. Saban discussed that challenge and more during his evening press conference.

"We're playing a team that's going to throw the ball 67 times in a game and we're going to have to play really, really well to keep them from scoring a lot of points, which they're capable of," Saban said. "Their defense has played very, very well. They do a lot of stuff up front that creates a lot of problems for you. So that's a challenge for us.

"So we need to really have great preparation because this is a different kind of team for us to prepare for. And I think that's going to very important to us being able to perform the way we want to perform on Saturday."

Kickoff is set for Saturday at 6 p.m (CT) on ESPN.