Amari Cooper says Alabama not looking for revenge against Texas A&M
By Mike Dyce
This weekend Alabama travels to College Station to play Texas A&M. Johnny Manziel led the Aggies to a victory over Alabama last season and that has the media machine in full stride. Television promos are playing up the revenge angle in the highly anticipated match up. One Alabama player says it isn’t about revenge though.
“Yeah, it’s the only game we lost last year,” wide receiver Amari Cooper said Monday. “To me, it’s not a revenge thing because if we wanted to get revenge, we’d have to play that same team last year with the same team we had last year.
“It’s really not a revenge thing. If you lose a fight with someone, you don’t get revenge from fighting someone else.”
Alabama head coach Nick Saban said his team won’t get involved in trash talking with Manziel who has taunted and jawed with opponents this year.
“It’s never a part of our game,” Saban said. “We tell our players, there’s no circumstance where you need to talk to another player, and there’s been very little of that with our team. Businesslike is the way we’d like to approach this game. It’s going to be emotional, don’t get me wrong. And I’m not trying to minimize the importance when I use the term businesslike.
“People who get emotional sometimes don’t make the best decisions.”
Quarterback A.J. McCarron is also not buying into the revenge angle.
“That’s last year,” he said. “Turn the page. I don’t really focus on what happened last year no matter if we won or we lost. I’m worried about this year and what we need to do to win this year.”