Crimson Red Sports

Nick Saban seemed torn on Saturday night.

Seven games into the 2011 season, Saban would like to be pleased with the way his University of Alabama football team has played.

At one point in his postgame press conference, Saban was asked how good he thought Alabama could be "when it played a full 60 minutes."

Rankled, Saban replied "I thought we played 60 minutes today but I guess if you took away the 30 seconds it took to make one play, then we didn't."

That "one play" was a 59-yard pass to set up Ole Miss' only touchdown. It was virtually the only highlight for the Rebels, but because it came on the game's first possession, it stuck in Alabama's craw, even as they spent the ensuing 58 minutes with their hands firmly around the Rebels' throat.

"We don't have many celebrated wins," Saban said, "because of expectations."

A good performance has to be followed by another, not admired in and of itself. It is a harsh reality. Alabama is good, very good, perhaps the best team in college football. Ask Ole Miss. But the sights of its fans now are set beyond "good," squarely on "great." And since Alabama can't prove greatness until Nov. 5 - and possibly even after that - the focus isn't on how good this team is, even when it dominates, but whether it can keep getting better

No one should forget when he brought his first Alabama team to Oxford, it barely survived a dogfight, a late Ole Miss rally and a postgame shower of shakers, shoes and Chivas. In the ensuing four years, Alabama has evolved into a pride of marauding lions and Ole Miss, somehow, has digressed into a single-cell organism hoping to somehow survive by photosynthesis and the occasional double-reverse.