Alabama quarterback Mac Jones: “We Feel Safe Here”

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Alabama redshirt-junior quarterback Mac Jones spoke to the media on Friday afternoon via Zoom, and detailed both how the offseason has gone and discussed his team’s preparation heading into what is sure to be one of the most interesting fall camps of his career.

Jones started off his session by first addressing his involvement with the #WeWantToPlay movement, a movement among college athletes over the last week letting their thoughts be known to the conferences of the NCAA and their willingness to play football in 2020 despite the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.

“We just wanted the people to hear our voice because at the end of the day the players are the ones playing,” Jones said. “We feel safe here. We feel comfortable and obviously there’s a lot of unknowns but we just wanted to get our voice out there and obviously we had a lot of guys that could have left last year but they came back so we want to play for those guys, we want to play for the younger teammates, we want to play for the whole organization and the state of Alabama so for me, just getting that out there and Najee [Harris] obviously doing that and a bunch other teammates of ours did that as well so I think that just voicing your opinion and letting people know that we want to play and that we feel safe.”

Preparing for the upcoming season during the pandemic has not been easy for teams across the country. With spring practices and scrimmage games cancelled many players haven't donned pads for a contact practice since the end of last season.

Over the summer, Alabama players have been on campus undergoing workouts and development as regulated by the NCAA. While the workouts have been different from what would typical be for a summer player's schedule, through social distancing and donning masks the team has been able to get a lot of work done.

After strength and conditioning coach Scott Cochran departed the team for Georgia following the 2019 season, Alabama hired David Ballou as its new coach from Indiana. Joining him from the Hoosiers was Dr. Matt Rhea, who became the Crimson Tide's football director of sports science.

According to Jones, the duo have been impressive in the offseason despite the current circumstances created by the coronavirus.

“I feel like this offseason has been really good for us,” Jones said. “Obviously for the first part of quarantine a lot of us was back home working out with private trainers or people like that — trying to practice social distancing. Coming back here, I feel like our new strength staff has done a really good job — coach Ballou, Dr. Rhea, everyone really — combining together and coming up with a really good plan to make us stronger, make us faster and in a short amount of time, all while doing it safely. They’ve done an unbelievable job there and we’ve been grinding. Everyone looks really good. I feel like the overall morale of the team is really good. Obviously as a leader I can see that some of these young guys look really good and all my other teammates are great as well so we’re all moving in the right direction. Like I said, we’re trying to just focus in and focus day by day and don’t worry about the speculation.”

After discussing summer workouts, Jones went on to discuss the likelihood of a College Football Playoff in 2020. Currently there is a lot of speculation surrounding the CFP and whether or not it will be played. As of this week, the CFP affirmed that it plans to move forward with the last three remaining conferences — the SEC, ACC and Big 12 — despite both the PAC-12 and Big Ten withdrawing and the NCAA canceling all fall other sports championships.

“The end goal is always — that’s why we all came here —just to play for a national championship,” Jones said. “There’s a lot of speculation and stuff and obviously I can’t tell you what we’re going to do or not but I mean the College Football Playoff is a separate organization from the NCAA and they seem like they want to move forward as well but at the end of day we just want to move along each day and try and win every game and if we do that we’ll go down as a great team and just take it day by day because like you said you don’t know if there is going to be a national championship but at the day you do want to win the national championship if there is one so if there’s one to play for we’ll play and we’ll be ready to go.”

Alabama football is currently scheduled to being its season on Sept. 26. The opponent and kickoff time has yet to be determined by the SEC.