Somehow the words “win” and “victory” really don’t do a game
like that justice, though. In fourth
grade Mrs. Baugh told us that if you didn’t know something, you should look it
up. We have a big fat Thesaurus (which sounds
like a dinosaur name) here. It suggested
“smearing and pasting and creaming and clobbering and shellacking and whopping
and whomping” but noted all of those were “nonformal”. Heaven knows if we value anything it is
formality, especially where the fancy pants Commodore Cornelius A. Vanderbilt
University is concerned. Still, though,
none of that seemed to quite cover it.
Maybe the best description is that it was pretty clear Vandy’s, um, rear
ends had begun to quit, along about the second series of the second quarter.
As the Commissioner mentions, he was gracious enough to ask
us to join him for the game. So we shut
down the service bays and put the Closed sign on the door for one Saturday
morning. Our friendly competitors down
the street towards Mr. Sam’s Barbeque probably picked up a few jobs that
otherwise would have been ours, but he always closes his shop on his birthday
in October to go deep sea fishing in Destin, so it’ll work out. Thanks to the Commissioner and his family for tolerating
us.
It was an awfully hot day on West End Avenue. However, we were honored to meet several
regular readers of The Grades. Thanks
for taking time to introduce yourselves and say “Roll Tide”. It made the day more special. Unfortunately, we don’t get to see those of
you that we do know nearly often enough and there are many of you that we’ve never
even been lucky enough to meet. But don’t
doubt that we appreciate each and every one of you and the time you invest to
read our thoughts about the varsity football program at the University of
Alabama.
The Commissioner has done such a great job of describing the
action, we thought we’d focus on some other things.
Coaching. We expect that the backups had heard enough
from the coaches, and others, about their fairly pedestrian performance against
CSU last week. They
were ready this week. It was funny to
see the team trying argue Coach Saban out of taking a knee on the last three
plays. We don’t disagree with that decision,
by the way. Watching them together,
though, backs up what the Coach has said a few times this fall -- he
just likes this team. He even sort of
smiled, well, as much as he does.
It’s really obvious to say that Coach Mason at Vanderbilt
has a chore ahead of him. He has to get
his bunch ready to go down to Gainesville to face a Florida team that has won
two conference games in a row which were still in the balance on the last
snap. The idea of “don’t let Alabama
beat you twice” has to be rolling around in his head. (And perhaps he’ll mention being a little
less vocal in front of television cameras when you are still excited about
beating a Big 12-ish team a/k/a don’t pull an elephant’s tail unless you have a
plan for dealing with its tusks.)
By the same token, however, we think Coach Saban and his
staff have a rather interesting task this week.
They have been pushing the team to play a complete game. And sure, there are some things to clean up
-- punt fielding was not as solid as it should have been, though maybe they
were just worn out from catching so many (and while we are on the subject Vandy’s
punter did a really, really excellent job on Saturday -- their most successful
player by far). We are also still
sometimes vulnerable to the screen pass, which Vanderbilt running backs
helpfully dropped a couple of on Saturday.
We dropped a couple of important passes.
There were low snaps. Generally
speaking though, there is much less to harp on this week. A team, especially a young team, may have a
tendency to get complacent and be a little full of themselves. The coaching staff is going to have to find a
way to get them focused on Mississippi.
As you’ll recall, the last time they came to Tuscaloosa for the 8 p.m.
game all manner of voodoo and shenanigans occurred. We are about sure we saw the Tooth Fairy riding a unicorn on the sidelines that night.
This is probably especially tough with the younger
players. As the broadcasters correctly
pointed out, we had a very successful play where the true freshman running back
adroitly picked up a blitzer so that the true freshman quarterback could complete
a touchdown pass to a true freshman receiver.
Those three guys probably didn’t have their first high school report
card on that ugly night in Tuscaloosa.
We’ve read that it is difficult to get a college team to
play at its highest level more than just a few times a season. They were clearly at a high level on
Saturday. They will need to give a great
effort again this Saturday to take care of business. So here is an odd chore for the coaching
staff to do with this team -- don’t let all the emotion you spent on Vandy last
week beat you this week.
Vandy Stadium. No two ways about it, Dudley Field is not a
great place to see a football game.
Tunnel access to the seats is always an issue. The aisles are not wide enough. The beaming sunshine had heated the aluminum seats to an uncomfortable degree by the 2:30 kickoff. By midway through the second quarter we’d
have been happy to see even creepy Larry Culpepper offering $10 bottles of warm
Dr. Pepper. The Commissioner’s son and heir
volunteered to go fetch water, as he is, shall we say, somewhat less seasoned
than the rest of us. (OK, we all get
discounts at the grocery store that he won’t qualify for until some more
decades have passed.) Took him nearly a
full quarter of a slow game. However, he
did exert heroic and much-appreciated efforts.
The point is that even just buying Dasani in sealed bottles with cash
costs you enjoying much of the game you overpaid to see. Sure, if it is on your “bucket list” to go
see a game in every SEC stadium, then, by all means, put Commodore Stadium on
the list -- at the bottom.
Supposedly, Vandy was more excited and confident for this
game than for any in several seasons. The
local newspaper was reporting as news that the student ticket allotment sold
out early in the week. Even so, the student section was perhaps 50%
full at kickoff. By the second quarter
it was full, except for the top few rows.
By the end of halftime, it was nearly empty. We are told this is fairly common at
Vanderbilt, if you’ll excuse us using the words “common” and “Vanderbilt” in
the same sentence. We’d go along with
the Commissioner’s guess on the crowd split.
It makes the stencil on the wall proclaiming it to be “Commodore Country”
a bit ironic. One final thing. Vanderbilt had a fairly long video invitation
from its president, encouraging, ok, practically begging, people to come to
homecoming (stop laughing). The problem
was, they didn’t show it till about 10 minutes left in the game. Let’s just say that besides the team,
parents, coaches, and band, which we assume are coming to homecoming anyhow,
there weren’t a lot of Vandy supporters there to hear it (now you can laugh).
Officiating. Blech.
This was just awful. The game
featured a roughing the passer call on a play where the ball was still in the quarterback’s
hand when the tackler made contact. “Diving
at the knees” should not be a penalty when an offensive player backpedals away
from a defensive player who has left his feet to make a lunging tackle. Or perhaps this is just one more step down
the slippery slope to two-hand touch.
Our running back was whistled down when he wasn’t. Another wasn’t whistled down when he clearly
was. On one touchdown we are still waiting
for someone, anyone, in a striped shirt to signal the score. Holding along the offensive line is
apparently no longer against the rules and both teams took advantage of this
new twist. The officials nearly let things get out of hand after the late hit
on Hurts, with cooler heads from both teams doing more to calm the situation
than anybody who has, you know, that job.
CBS Broadcast. We do give relatively high marks to Brad Nessler. He is a solid play-by-play man -- gets the
names right and isn’t afraid to tell Danielson when he is full of it. Allie LaForce was pretty prompt with sideline
injury reports. And we did have some
sympathy for them trying to find things to talk about by the end. Ronnie Clark is a great story, but we
understand when you are around the team for maybe four hours before game day it
probably doesn’t occur to you to have an interview with the sixth-string
running back. The lesson they don’t seem
to have learned is that television is different from radio. If you don’t talk constantly on radio, people
think you’ve gone off the air. If you do
talk constantly on television, people think you are in love with the sound of
your own voice. It’s TV. We don’t need a “word picture” because we
have actual pictures. Hush for a minute
-- we won’t change channels and it’ll save your voice.
In the stands, it seemed that the television time outs were
terribly long. We tried to blame it on
the heat. We should have blamed
CBS. We watched the recording we made
and counted the ads. By our count, from the beginning of the
broadcast to the final whistle, there were 104 different full-blown commercials. We are not counting the various in-game promos
like Home Depot and the Aflac Duck and the sponsored first down line, staring
line-ups, etc. One thing we did notice,
though -- after running their 3-4 commercials during a time out CBS will invariably
run an additional several seconds of a promo for upcoming CBS broadcasts, like Young Sheldon (which for some reason
made us think of Young Frankenstein
-- we’re betting the new show won’t be that good). Then they take some more time to show you an aerial
view or subject you to what Gary thinks Tim Tebow would do at this point in the
game. That’s part of what makes it so
long. We get it, you have to sell
advertising time to pay the conference to show the games. And you pay a lot. But come on CBS, you aren’t even trying to
make this bearable. Worst of all, it
affects the pace and momentum of the game.
Enough complaining after a memorable victory on a beautiful
day. On to the Rebellious Black Bear
Land Shark Ackbars of Old Misdial University.
They were off last Saturday to rest up.
The game’s not till late so maybe we can sell some tires and turn some
brake rotors next Saturday morning and still be settled in well before kickoff. We hope you are, too. Roll Tide everyone.
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