Not only did Alabama manage to beat itself Saturday night,
it darn near blew itself out.
Great job, Commissioner.
And you very nearly made a silk purse of future hope out of the sow’s
ear of Saturday night. Look at it this
way, if I had told you Friday we’d put up over 500 yards of total offense, play
two quarterbacks, have only 4 penalties, make all our field goals and extra
points, only punt twice, score 37 points, and possess the ball for nearly 11
minutes more than the opponent, what would you have been willing to bet we won
the game? Yeah, we'd have lost the mortgage money again, too.
Unfortunately, the reports we’d heard from practice
throughout fall camp turned out to be witheringly true. We have a serious quarterback issue. We are somewhat curious about the thinking
that went into giving Bateman his first start against Mississippi’s defense. I mean, when we start a new guy on the tire
machine, we don’t make his first job a 700-series BWM with custom rims, but we
don’t coach football, either. The truth
is that both our quarterbacks still: stare down primary receivers, seem
confused about what play should be run and just snap the ball anyway, make the
wrong reads of the defense, get visibly discouraged/frustrated, see all their
receivers covered and inexplicably throw it to one, even after having correctly
chucked it into the stands just a down or two before, show great poise by going
on a key scramble and then throw a ball that looks like a punt…. I could go on, but it’s starting to upset my
stomach.
Our defensive backs are apparently being coached not to pay
attention to the ball coming in when they are covering a receiver. I think the strategy is to read the receiver,
especially his eyes, then knock the ball from his grasp or pull his arm away
from it when it arrives. This sounds
terribly difficult and different to me.
But we’ve all lost count of the Alabama db’s over the last few seasons
that played this way. They just can’t
all be screwing it up in exactly the same way unless they are being taught to
do that. I don’t think that “looking for
the ball” standard is actually in the rule book, as the commentators seem to
suggest. However, because we are talking
about SEC officials, all that rule book mumbo jumbo really doesn’t apply any
way. There have been too many times
already this season where if the man in coverage had just faced the line of
scrimmage the football would have hit him between the numbers, including
Saturday night. In short, I don’t see
this changing.
So much was weird and ugly on Saturday that it’s hard to
remember it all.
Their QB is falling down, throws blind off his back foot,
hits our guy in the back of the helmet and they score a touchdown (and no, I’m
not inclined to give Mississippi “credit” for that). Our guy chucks one in more or less that same
circumstances and hits their DB in the chest.
They run that cheating pass at-the-line-of-scrimmage play that all of
the go-fast hunh spread option teams have been cheating with since they changed
the play clock and the officials throw a flag on the always difficult to
discern over-the-line-of-scrimmage point but can’t see a hulking 300+ pound
offensive lineman who was further up the field than half of our defensive
backs. Our guy fumbles and it bounces
right to them; they get the benefit of the doubt on the quarterback’s arm
“going forward”. Then they do fumble one
and in violation of every law of physics it goes under the gigantic A’Shawn Robinson to be recovered by them. It was that sort of night. Strike that, I don’t recall another night
like that one.
We can’t get this memory out of our minds. We are driving, gashing their defense, and
the medium-size farm tractor that is Derrick Henry breaks his facemask. He has to leave the field and wait while they
put a on a new one. In all the gojillion
dollars that our athletic department earns, is there no such thing as the
generic “extra” helmet -- or maybe one each in sizes M/L/XL/J that we could
just scribble a “2” on with white Sharpie for a down or two? And then they show the poor guy whose title
is probably something like “Assistant to the Equipment Manager” and he’s
putting the new facemask on with a screwdriver that looks exactly like the one
from the Handy Andy Tool Set my parents bought me when I was about 5 (note:
it’s probably somewhere in their attic).
Sheesh. We’re going to hit the
work bench in the service bay Monday and ship the University one of our couple
of dozen electric screwdrivers. Nifty
technology. They work real fast and won’t
take up much room in that tractor trailer
the team uses to haul equipment. Don’t
bother to thank us. I digress (I heard
you thinking “as usual”).
And despite all of that …
no, make it despite ALL of that, Alabama had the
ball first down at its 35 with three minutes remaining, a time out, and a
Mississippi defense that was trying in vain to strain a few molecules of oxygen
out of the Tuscaloosa humidity. Make no
mistake, this was a game Alabama should have won, by at least a couple of
scores. At a minimum we should have
taken our first lead in the game late in the 4th Quarter. For reasons we are probably not smart enough
to understand, we abandoned our offense at that point. The Commissioner has, as usual, done a masterful
job of cataloging what went wrong. Lost
in the sheer soul-deflating disappointment is what went right.
This team showed resilience.
Which it is going to need by the barge-load between now and
Thanksgiving. If you forget the costly
kickoff fumbles, which we won’t this side of Alzheimer’s Disease, special teams
actually had a solid night. Our punter
dropped one inside the 10 and otherwise appeared to be rounding back into
shape. We hit our PATs despite a bad
hold and, gasp, even made a field goal, though to be fair, we made some
strategic decisions not to try field goals in a couple of spots. The back up long snapper didn’t miss a
beat. We got a perfect on-side
kick. With one exception coverage was
good…. Derrick Henry is a serious
football player and if you don’t hit him in the backfield before he gets some
momentum he’s probably going to hurt one of your players. Did you notice he had well over 100 yards
rushing on one of the best defenses in the country? Their passing game hurt us, but we started a
freshman and two redshirt freshmen at DB.
Probably should have been worse. We lost arguably our best receiver and guys
were still getting open in the 4th quarter. Mullaney reminds us of Kevin Norwood. And Lord knows, this team is due some good
breaks between now and year end, shoot, the Universe may owe us some good luck
into the next decade -- the Moe, Larry, and Curley officiating crew sure does.
Also, as long as we are in free-form babbling, it is time
for someone in authority to stiffen their spine and tell ESPN that starting a
game a 10:20 Eastern time is stupid and that we aren’t going to do it anymore. Where in the name of the Theory of Relativity is 10:30 pm considered "Prime time". What with their police escort back to the
hotel (or their private jet) and not needing to be at work again till Friday, ESPN
doesn’t care. If they had to sit in
post-game traffic till the wee hours of Sunday morning, they might feel
differently about it. You want to do a doubleheader? Start the first one at 5 Eastern. At least the game that starts on Saturday will end before Sunday. It ain't cricket, after all.
Oh well, we’re going to get upset all over again and tomorrow’s a
work day, so we can’t spend it curled up in a ball saying over and over, “let the kick off roll through the end zone”.
Faulkner may have been right about the past not being past,
but he didn’t say we could do anything about it, either. On to ULM.
In case you have forgotten how bad things were once upon a time, this is
another revenge game. I know that sounds
kind of silly, but ULM spent about two years promoting its “university” based
on the strength of a victory over a (inappropriate) probation-weakened Alabama, even buying freaking billboards on
the highway. I hope we hang half a
hundred on them. Of course, I hope that
every week.
Got to go see if the dog is still scared to be in the same room
with me.
Roll Tide, y’all.
The Correspondent from the Tire Store
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