Nick Saban may not even know who his backup quarterback will be when Alabama takes the field for the season opener against Duke in Atlanta but he’s hoping to get that player in the game as much as possible early in the season.

For the first time since the 2016 season, Alabama doesn’t know what it has behind its starting quarterback. While Tua Tagovailoa may have not have seen the field before the 2017 season, based on his recruiting hype and his performance in his first spring game in Tuscaloosa, it didn’t take very long for the program to know it had something special in the Hawaiian native.

With Jalen Hurts off to Oklahoma, the same cannot be said for the program heading into the team’s upcoming training camp and that’s something Saban was willing to admit during his Thursday appearance on the Paul Finebaum Show.

When asked how he utilized Tagovailoa off the bench early in the QB’s career and did the same with Hurts last season, Saban noted the plan would remain the same for the quarterback that wins the backup job behind Tua exiting Alabama’s upcoming training camp — get him on the field as much as possible to get him comfortable in the offense in meaningful action.

“Well, I think it’s really important especially when you have a player who doesn’t have a lot of experience,” Saban said about playing his backup quarterback during the regular season. “You want him to get as much experience as possible so that when he gets an opportunity and he’s in a must play situation that he can actually go out there and perform with confidence because he’s had enough experience to do that.

“I mean we purposely played Tua a lot, you know, two years ago. Last year we played Jalen even though he had a lot of experience we wanted him to play and go out there and play in situations — I’m not talking about mop-up now, I’m talking about running the offense with the players. So if you have to do this, you know we’re not going to skip a beat. And we’ll try to do the same thing this year with whoever the backup quarterback is.”

If Mac Jones is that guy, the good news for Alabama is the Florida native has already appeared in six games for the Crimson Tide. However, he has only 13 career attempts with 123 passing yards. Should the Tide need to count on Jones against a solid defense, he’s likely going to need more reps before he feels comfortable stepping up into that role on the field when it counts.