10 reasons the 4th quarter was a bullshit and not a driver of Nick Saban or Alabama's success: 1. Football is typically 5s of very high intensity effort, followed by 30s of recovery, for ~6 plays. Then you get a long break of several minutes. That's tough on your alactic and aerobic energy pathways. You train these with very high intensity, short duration efforts and more sustained, lower intensity, easy to recover from efforts respectively. Training to sustain plays much longer than football, with less rest than football, for much higher volumes than football probably isn't making you better at football. That would be like running repeat 800s if your goal is to win the 100m. Will you occasionally have to prepare for worst case scenarios like back to back 3 and outs? Or goal line to goal line drives? Yes, but there's been one 20 play drive in the NFL this century. The more you prepare for a worst case scenario that simply won't occur, the more you detract from a typical case scenario that WILL occur. Do you always need to train in a highly specific fashion that looks like the sport to improve performance? No, but living in the middle zone of intensity detracts form the development of the other 2 systems and should be limited to a few weeks per year, not several months of off-season which is your best opportunity to develop underlying physical qualities. Want proof it can be done? @MattRheaPhD is on record saying there's basically zero conditioning component to football (not sure I would go that far but anyway) and he was part of the undefeated national championship staff.... AT ALABAMA. The common denominator is everything else that made them a great organisation (chiefly the coach, staff, roster and money).