An entertaining issue of The Grades, Commissioner. Thanks for taking time from your busy schedule to entertain and education. And certainly one with a message we can all
take to heart. Sure, nothing's perfect. At this stage of the season, no college team
should be. The NFL is the league where
everything needs to run at its top level from Week 1. The college game is different. You want and expect your team to improve over
the course of the year. It is dictated
by its very nature in the turnover of seasoned players with each graduation ceremony. However, it did seem that much of the team,
like a lot of the rest of the students, became disinterested in the contest
when it became clear that if it kept its foot on the gas, they could run over
CSU at will. Say, about the last play of
the first quarter. That is not a mistake
than can be allowed to turn into a habit.
On the other hand, as quality of opponent increases, we suspect that a
more competitive instinct will emerge. Our
guess is that it will be a point of some emphasis by the coaching staff this
week.
On to the individual units.
Defense: The Defense
(at least the brand played after the first quarter, during which CSU managed a
mere 11 yards) left a good bit to be desired.
Having said that, it is fair to consider that for this game the lineup
was missing five linebackers due to injury.
There is hope that at least Dylan Moses, Anfernee Jennings, and, perhaps
most critically signal-caller, Rashaan Evans will be available for the game in
Nashville on Saturday. That position
group has been hit hard by the injury bug.
Unfortunately, that position group is integral to quality defensive
performance in the 3-4 scheme. No use
crying over it.
Despite those losses,
the stop troops held a quality opponent with a good quarterback to a relatively
low point total. What we do have to improve is our play against
delays/quarterback draws, screen passes, and fades to the corner of the end
zone. We have heard Coach Saban expound
more than once on the defense employed on the last of these. Match the pattern of the receiver, when his
eyes widen as the ball comes in, either sweep it away or pull his arm off the
ball as he tries to make the catch.
Unfortunately, that tactic does not seem to be supporting the overall
strategy of preventing touchdowns. Too
often, even employed enthusiastically, the effort results in a catch, a pass
interference call, or as on Saturday night, both. Blech.
At least one of those passes would have hit our defender in the
facemask, had he been facing the quarterback instead of the receiver. Is there a better way to play it? Shoot, we don't know. We change tires and adjust alignment. What we do know is that if we've tried the
same thing to line up someone's front end three or four times and it's not
working, maybe we should try something else.
Special Teams:
Lordy. This is an area of the
team that is improving and even (gasp) threatening to become a weapon. Pappanastos was perfect on the night making
two 40+ yard field goals. Wonder what the proposition bet odds would have been
on that. Scott punted like, well, like
JK Scott. The 50+ yard FG he attempted was wide, but only just, and had
another 8 yards in it. Regular readers
will know that down here we think missing a field goal attempt of over about 40
yards is not the fault of the kicker, but of the offense for not getting him in
a more reasonable range before fourth down.
The return game is not contributing at quite the level we would like,
perhaps. On the other hand, they have
not committed the regular as clockwork blocks in the back we had grown accustomed
to. They are quietly and sure-handedly
fielding punts and kick offs, and they are making smart decisions on which
balls to return and which to fair catch/ground.
We are holding kick returners short of the 20-yard line generally and
frequently kicking the football off out of the dadgum end zone. CSU had zero punt return yards on the
evening. Is the kicking game
perfect? No. Is it improving? You bet your sweet kicking tee it is.
Offense: The first
team could have probably scored 60 or more points on CSU. There is clearly a significant drop off
between the first and second offensive lines, though one would expect that to
be the case. Scarborough and the unheralded
D. Harris ran with authority, hitting holes when they were there, making holes
when they were not there, and being brought down on touchdown saving shoestring
tackles. CSU regularly had 8 men within
three yards of the line of scrimmage and cheated safeties up. At least as far as the first team went, it
didn't matter. The most versatile RB of
the bunch, Joshua Jacobs, has been missing since a Fall Camp injury. He got one carry, we think on the only play
where he was in the game, and got six tough yards in the red zone. Nice to see him back. Najee Harris never really got a chance to get
going behind the previously mentioned second-string offensive line. Our coaches do not really do our second
string offense a lot of favors by keeping them to a very limited set of plays
and options when they appear in blow out games.
This does not help the second string defense either, keeping it on the
field a lot, late in the game. But when
you are missing five linebackers, and generally have four on the field in your
base alignment, it doesn't take much to get pretty far down on the three-deep
chart.
We hope and expect to see a lot saltier and consistent
performance on Saturday. We expect the
Head Coach will allude to that in his remarks to the team this week. We also understand the defense is holding a
players' only meeting on Monday at the invitation of Messers. Hamilton and Jones. We expect a message of the fire-and-brimstone
variety to be delivered.
[Here, we climb up on a stack of wooden shipping pallets (we
don't order soap by the box)]:
One thing we are kind of tired of hearing is about how come
Jalen Hurts cannot do this or that. Now,
we understand there is a decent cohort of the fan base who is either too young
to remember or has chosen to block it from memory like a bad car accident, but
the truth is that some of us do remember Spencer Pennington, Brandon Avalos,
and John David Phillips. Every week, the
Chicken Little Brigade is out in full voice on Sunday -- "We'll never win
a championship until Jalen Hurts can _______________..."
And it tends to be something new every week
because Hurts is maturing before our eyes.
Originally it was that he never threw check down passes. Now he regularly delivers swing passes and
safety valves to the running backs. Two weeks ago it was that Jalen was not
throwing the ball to enough different people, focusing instead on Calvin Ridley
(though, to be fair, if you have one pass for your life, whom on our current
roster would you pick to catch it?)
Well, Saturday night eight different players caught passes from Hurts. Sunday morning we woke to hear, not praise
for spreading the passes around to different athletes, like the incredibly
speedy Robert Foster, but instead whining about why Hurts can't exploit
intermediate length passes in the middle of the field. We figure he'll complete about four of those
against Vanderbilt and next Sunday we'll be hearing that we'll never win the
SEC until Jalen learns to ride his unicycle or cast more accurately with a fly
rod. As one of the announcers correctly
said on Saturday night: "If he
walked on water they'd complain because he can't swim."
Look, with Hurts at
the quarterback position Alabama has lost exactly one game in the last 18. In that game, his heroics gave the Special
Teams and Defense a legitimate chance to win in the fourth quarter. (He shares some criticism for that loss, to
be sure.) There are parts of his game
that could be better. He is very young
with the chance to improve, much like a lot of the rest of this team. He was recruited to be a dual threat
quarterback -- one that could play the traditional role as well as pull the
ball down and make a defense pay for leaving running lanes open. Have you watched him glide down the field
like a deer zipping through the forest, with linebackers and defensive backs
lunging with all the grace of a falling oak tree at the spot where he just was? That is what we recruited him to do. And now people whine that the sky is hitting
them in the top of the head when he rips off 150+ yards rushing and scores a
touchdown or two. "This will never
do. Jalen should be ordered to stand in
the pocket until he goes through 11 progressions of the passing tree and
completes a two-yard dump off to the running back." Pish posh.
Our offensive line has not exactly been giving him a six-second time to
affect ratio, though it was better Saturday -- that is a subject for another
Tire Store Report. Let Hurts be who he
is, because that is what we wanted. Stop
complaining that the banana split we have isn't as good as someone else's
lollipop. Take a deep breath and enjoy
the options and advantages that he gives this team as well as his pure athletic
talent. In our view, too much time is spent judging
this fish on his ability to climb trees.
But, but, but what are
we going to do when we meet a team that can put eight men in the box, contain
our running game, dedicate a spy to Hurts, and cover all our wide receivers
one-on-one?" We don't know. The last we looked the Houston Texans aren't
on the schedule this year and so far we haven't seen a college team that could achieve
all that. We'll see.
Let us pose it in the same way you began, Commissioner. For which other SEC quarterback would you
like to trade last year's Offensive Player of the Year? Dormady at Tennessee? Ettling at LSU? Preseason Heisman Favorite (at least in Lee
County) Stidham or his backup White (assuming he has made bail by next weekend)? No, you say?
Fitzgerald at MSU -- I promise to listen quietly to your argument, but
you won't convince me. Based on Total
QBR, Hurts ranks fifth in the country -- three of those above him play in the
Defense-Optional Big 12-ish. The other
plays for Vanderbilt. Rhetorically, for
this coming Saturday's game, would you prefer if our defense was trying to
decide how to defend against Jalen Hurts and we were relying on Kyle Shurmur to
lead us to victory on West End Avenue? Seriously?
We suppose it is true that there is no hope for the satisfied
man. And Coach Saban himself probably
needs to acknowledge no superiors in the quest-for-perfection and desire-for-improvement
categories. Do we think this is a championship
caliber team right now, three games into the season? No, as a matter of fact, we do not. Do we think it could be? You bet your Spencer Pennington jersey we do.
TO COMMENT ON THIS POST, PLEASE CLICK ON THE ABOVE LINK.
No comments:
Post a Comment