We were in the stadium for the game Saturday. Homecoming is always a festive occasion to
celebrate. However, setting the
homecoming game for the penultimate game of the regular season seems a little
off. Perhaps that’s a way to encourage
attendance. The student section was
noticeably somewhat empty. Some of that
is certainly attributable to quality of competition. However, other factors are in play. Things have changed a bit since we left
Tuscaloosa. Classes are now officially
dismissed on Tuesday afternoon of Thanksgiving week. More than a few professors decided
unilaterally to add an extra day to the holiday, therefore making Monday
classes an endangered species. Bottom
line, lots of students, especially the ones who live more than a few county
lines away, take Thanksgiving week off and slipped off after Friday
classes. We can understand how skipping
the Western Carolina game made sense if you were already pushing a point with
mom to head back to school the Friday after Thanksgiving.
We do not see much to add to the Grades; they were
excellently done. We’d have been tempted
to give everyone an Incomplete on this pop quiz, pending completion of the
major exam that is coming on Saturday.
No doubt about it, Alabama could have pretty much won the
game with one hand tied behind its back.
And sort of, they proved it. The
offense played without T. J. Yeldon, DeAndrew White, and Amari Cooper (after
about the fourth play). Our starting
place kicker “rested”. We hope this
means that this quartet will be well rested and raring to go come Saturday.
We did notice some things that may not have been obvious if
you only saw the television broadcast.
1. Blake Sims, with relatively
little fanfare, has achieved some milestones worth mentioning. Here’s an interesting comparison of recent
first-year quarterbacks:
Year Att/Comp Percentage Total Yards TDs Int.
McElroy (2009) 198/325 60.9%
2508
17 4
McCarron (2011) 219/328 66.8%
2634 16 5
Sims (2014) 187/301 62.1% 2676 20 4
Please note that the numbers for the first two fellows on
that list reflect a full season. If the
dates associated with the first two names don’t give you a warm fuzzy feeling,
then you have dropped into the wrong blog.
2. We know that
sometimes people close to the football program read The Grades. Accordingly, will one of you fine folks
please: 1. go in Coach Kiffen’s office; 2. open his playbook to that page with
the play where Cooper lines up in the backfield to start the game and runs wide
so as to be hammered by gigantic defensive players; and 3. tear that page out
and eat it. Cooper reached for his leg
and asked to come out of the game after the very first play, but the coaches
told him to stay on the field. When he
got a helmet in the leg near the goal line a few plays later, the entire
stadium took a deep breath and held it.
3. This was the
Catamounts’ last game of the season. For
a decent number, Saturday was the last time they would ever play organized
football. That probably didn’t help with
the attitude and shenanigans that went on in the game. Getting called for two chop blocks probably
means there were several others, especially given the officiating (see below). We need to be more careful about that
scheduling in the future. This winter’s
P5 meetings may take care of that problem by itself, but I would hope the
Catamounts are not on the list of potential future opponents.
4. Compared to the
team that played in Oxford, these guys are noticeably having a lot more
fun. The team mobbed Nyeswander when he
scored the first touchdown of his career.
The only thing that would have made it better is if Verne would have had
to pronounce his name. The same thing
for Bell, who was taking all sorts of good-natured ribbing for not scoring on
his fourth-quarter carry. Great to see
guys like this get in the game and contribute.
5. In the same spirit
of Nyeswander and Bell getting their carries, Western Carolina’s coach decided
to let one of his unappreciated heroes get a chance. He called a fake field goal to give his placekicker,
Richard Sigmon, the play of his dreams, a chance to score a touchdown for his
alma mater. I fear that the Catamounts’
coach may have set a record in the category “Unintended Consequences”. Instead of a lifelong memory of sprinting
around end for a touchdown in one of the cathedrals of college football, Sigmon
probably just got nightmare fuel for the next dozen years. Before the snap, Trey Depriest moved out of
his position in the middle of the line and sprinted for the left side of the Alabama
formation. The 190-pound kicker took the
ball and ran in that direction, with Eddie Jackson in hot pursuit, and found
himself on what amounted to a naked bootleg alone on the edge facing DePriest
(255 program weight) and Landon Collins (a svelte 222). Collins got there first. “Wake up, Richard, you are having the dream
again”.
6. We don’t know for
sure what happened on the play were two of our receivers essentially ran a pick
play to keep either of them from being where Sims threw the ball for his first
interception in forever. They were both
looking at each other with their palms turned up as if to ask, “what are you doing
here?” Sims was asked about the play
after the game. A good leader, he
immediately took the blame for what was obviously an error by at least one receiver. He said he must not have answered their
questions well enough. I admire him for
that, but hope someone else got their rear end chewed out. It didn’t much matter against Western
Carolina, but we can’t have that sort of thing from here on.
7. On a non-football
matter, we are usually fans of the Alabama Department of Transportation. Usually they are not too speedy in getting
big potholes fixed, creating tire and alignment business. They are also occasionally guilty of leaving
construction debris around, which leads to more of the same. But, if you live near the person responsible
for deciding on when to close interstate lanes, please do us a favor and go
over to their house sometime, preferably when it is raining, and let all the
air out of their tires. It should not be
a difficult calculation to know that closing I-65 down to one lane in
Birmingham on a day when Alabama and Auburn both had home football games is a
boneheaded idea. To all of you that we
missed at the tailgate and otherwise on the Quad because of our tardy arrival,
we apologize. The only bright spot was
that the traffic was so slow we got a chance to hop out and snatch a couple of
those mangy looking tiger tails the API fans have taken to hanging out of their
trunks. Well, we actually resisted the
temptation, but it was a temptation. Blue Toyota Camry, Madison County plates,
you are welcome.
Officiating: We’ve
run out of adjectives for the sorry state of SEC Officiating. Saturday night, however, may have been a new
low.
This group made the Three Stooges look like Nobel Prize
nominees. We looked it up, inadvertent
means “not achieved through deliberate planning.” How in the world that description applies to
blowing a plastic whistle is hard to imagine.
Sadly, as far as we can find out, they applied the rule correctly. If you cause a fumble on a play where Curley
blows his whistle without deliberate planning, even though Larry correctly
signals the change of possession, then Moe has to give the team that just lost
the ball the choice of whether to re-run the play. Choice? Wonder what the set of circumstance would be
where the offense says, “oh, yeah, just let them have the ball”? Apparently at least one of the stooges is on
the rule-writing committee -- Shemp would be our guess. Our hope is that this play becomes the film
they review before they quietly change this rule over the summer. Or maybe Moe will just poke Larry in the eyes
and slap Curley on the top of his head and we’ll just go along. The Commissioner has already cataloged the
major blown calls from Saturday evening.
This group apparently had not finished reading the rule book before the gane and therefore didn’t understand
that you can call offensive pass interference.
These guys shouldn’t be allowed to officiate the Hubbertville Marion
County game on Friday night.
As we say, this may
have been a new low, but we’ve only been watching for 45 years or so. Nyuk,
nyuk, nyuk.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Roll Tide, everyone. Beat Auburn.
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