re: What's your realistic projection for overall season?

"It used to be that good defense beats good offense. Good defense doesn't beat good offense anymore," Saban told ESPN on Friday. "It's just like last week. Georgia has as good a defense as we do an offense, and we scored 41 points on them [in a 41-24 Alabama win]. That's not the way it used to be. It used to be if you had a good defense, other people weren't going to score. You were always going to be in the game.

"I'm telling you. It ain't that way anymore."

And how's that sit with Saban, one of the foremost defensive minds in the game and the architect of some of the more dominant defenses in college football over the last two decades?

"I don't like it," he said with a wry smile. "But we just have to make sure we have an offense that's that way and that explosive, which we have."

"It's hard to coach defense now, because there are so many run-pass concepts in what everybody does," Saban said. "I mean, it's really, really hard to coach the secondary ... because you get so many mismatches back there."

"We're not very good on defense, average at best, but I think we will get better," said Saban, adding that to be elite on defense requires being especially good in the secondary.

"We're going to get there, but this group [in the secondary] doesn't have enough experience. You've got to go through growing pains with these guys because they see so much stuff now in college football. We see something different every week."