Arkansas Grades

With the Commissioner on temporary duty deep in enemy territory (aka New York City) we have the combined privilege and difficult task of grading of the Crimson Tide’s football efforts from Saturday night.

We got to listen to Coach Saban’s post-game press conference.  According to our careful written tally, he used some variation of the word “consistent” or “inconsistent” eleventy hundred and nine times.  There’s a reason for that.  Variations on that theme abounded in the Crimson Tide’s winning effort in the game itself.  It was a hard-hitting game that likely has the training room for each team dealing with all sorts of strains, sprains, bumps, and bruises this morning.

The chosen Arkansas mascot, the Razorback, seems to have somehow morphed into the fictional, cartoony, endearing pig -- more in the line of Babe, or Porky, or that pig in Charlotte’s Web that we can’t remember the name of.  That’s a little bit of a shame.  If you’ve been around real hogs very much, there’s just not much endearing about them.  In fact, the wild variety is deadly dangerous.  Hogs can weigh 300 pounds or better.  Those allowed to be feral, rather than the overly fatty variety raised on farms, have sharp hooves, sharp tusks (at least the boars), can out run you especially across uneven ground, eat stuff the dogs would run away from, and are one of the smarter animals on earth.  A full-grown feral hog is pretty much without a natural enemy besides a person with a gun.

It was this variety of hog that showed up in Bryant Denny on a cloudy Saturday evening.  You’ve probably heard it by now, but the Arkansas offensive line is the heaviest offensive line in football -- not the FBS division, not college football, all of football.  Their defensive line is also large and athletic, built specifically to stop teams that want to line up and run the ball like, well, like the Arkansas offense does.  Despite difficult-to-explain early losses, Arkansas is a dangerous team, just like its mascot.

If you do not play well, particularly at the point of attack on a given play, the Arkansas Razorbacks will make you pay for it.  Far too many times on Saturday night, inconsistent play by Alabama, especially its offense, meant that a price was paid.  This was a game where Alabama had a chance to jump out to an early lead, force Arkansas to go away from its bread-and-butter offense, and stay out of a four-quarter slugfest.  Inconsistency kept it from doing so.  Alabama’s first two offensive drives were, at their beginning, things of beauty.  On the first drive, Alabama mostly passed and drove the ball well into the red zone.  On the second drive, Alabama mostly ran the ball, and drove the ball well into the red zone.  The Tide was keeping possession, moving the ball, imposing its will, and by its third possession had a scant three points to show for it.

Just reading the stats, you would think Alabama beat a cartoony version of  the Razorbacks rather than the wandering-around-in-the-forest-looking-to-maim-you kind.  Alabama had 22 first downs to Arkansas 10, outgained them 390 to 220 yards, had 21 more total offensive plays, and possessed the ball for almost 34 minutes of the contest.  Arkansas punted 10 times.  On the other hand, Alabama lost the turnover battle, converted (again) less than half of its third down opportunities, gave up another long touchdown when the quarterback was running for his life, etc.

Actually, there are a lot of other statistics that bear out Alabama’s alternately hot and cold play.  However, in a few minutes that analysis starts to look like math, and, well, we not so math do good.  Consider this one, though, before we move on the grades themselves.  Alabama had one offensive drive last night that lasted one play, 11 seconds, covered 71 yards, and resulted in 7 points.  Alabama had another drive that netted  -4 yards, took almost two minutes, and resulted in three points.  Let that sink in a minute.

Enough counting.  On to the Grades.

Offense:  C.  Alabama won the football game against a conference opponent.  Without some special teams issues (noted below) it should have scored 30 or more points again.  Six players caught passes.  Henry very quietly and at great physical cost had another 100 yard game.  Coker showed himself to be a resilient, hard-nosed competitor that is willing to scramble for needed yards.  His quarterback rating for the game was actually a quite impressive 147.  Ridley had 9 catches for 140 yards.  Along with the possession advantage, those sort of factors should always merit a passing grade.

On the other hand, it wasn’t excellent and we can’t even bring ourselves to use the word “good”.  So fair is what they earned.  The offense turned the ball over twice.  One of those turnovers was a by now too-familiar situation where instead of feeling pressure and rolling out or throwing the ball away, Coker threw with a defender bearing down on him, late, behind, off his back foot, heck for all we know his eyes were closed, for an easy interception that killed a drive.  The other turnover was caused when a just too high pass was tipped by a receiver.  Speaking of, Coker’s numbers should have been better.  Receivers dropped balls that they touched with both hands.  If your quarterback is struggling a little bit, the receivers have to help him out.  Ours did not.  Coker seems to have a habit of throwing too high and too hard on occasion, especially near the goal line.  The coaches need to help him remedy that.  Finally, he is doing a better job of going through his progressions -- unfortunately sometimes he’s too quick and another half second might let him see a receiver break open.  Some of that is on the offensive line, see below.

The running game never really got going again like it did in the second drive of the first quarter.  Sometimes you can tell that the runners are trying to do too much.  Follow the blocks and the play gains an easy 5-6 yards.  Instead, players improvise and not only do they not get the long run, they don’t even get the easy five yards.  Worse, we have seen in every game this year at least a play or two where our quarterback and running back were not on the same play in the play book.  Against Wisconsin, it was opening day jitters.  Against MTSU, we weren’t taking them seriously enough.  Against Georgia, the conditions were bad.  Last night, um, well, the dog ate our play book?  Certainly credit the Arkansas defense, but good defensive play does not explain why the quarterback thought the play was run/left and the running back thought it was run/right.

When all is said and done, the frustrating thing about this offense, and the way we see it the key to many of our issues is the inconsistent play of the offensive line.  Unfortunately, the problems seem to go all across the line.  We lost count of how many times Coker was being pressured only a second or two into his drop on pass plays.  He was hit hard and often (say what you will about this guy, he takes a lick and stands back up).  Henry and Drake were both hit in the backfield on simple run plays.  We incurred drive-killing holding penalties.  Stunts confuse us.  But on other occasions the offensive line would establish a new line of scrimmage three yards down field.  They would blow men off the ball at the point of attack. 

As fans, we always expect the team to play at least as well this Saturday as they did last Saturday, though that expectation may be unrealistic.  It has to be said that Saturday Alabama regressed.  Thus the grade is “fair” with a note in the margin that it “Needs Rapid Improvement”.

Defense: A. 

Besides the long pass after the issue was decided, the Hogs’ long scoring drive was 12 yards.  Statistics back up our initial impression.  Arkansas’ quarterback Bo Wallace Brandon Allen was 15/32 for 176 yards with two touchdowns and an interception.  But 54 of those yards came on a single play.

Arkansas is built to run the football.  It could not.  With Chubb’s horrific injury, Arkansas’ Alex Collins is probably one of the top 5 or 6 active running backs in the conference.  Last night he gained 26 yards on 12 attempts with a long of five yards.  Without subtracting sacks, five Arkansas players carried the ball 26 times for 46 yards.  Given the Arkansas offensive line, this may be the most impressive statistic an Alabama defense has recorded in years.

It drives me crazy when announcers say that an offense is “picking on” Marlon Humphrey -- as if he is some sort of liability.  That is not what teams are doing.  They no longer want to throw the ball where Cyrus Jones is playing -- Humphrey’s side of the field happens to be the only other option.  That’s a far cry from saying that Humphrey is somehow vulnerable; it’s merely a relative choice.  Collectively, the defensive backs get better every game.  To the extent they are inconsistent it is because of youth and inexperience. 

This defense is good enough to give Alabama a solid chance to beat any team on its schedule, especially if the offense and special teams don’t handicap it with a short field.  That is what must remain consistent.

Special Teams:

Punting:  A.  We had a punt partially blocked last night and that would usually merit an automatic F.  Snaps were (stop me if you’ve heard this before) inconsistent.  But the partially blocked punt traveled over 40 yards.  Scott is still not kicking them as high as last year, it doesn’t seem, but for the game he averaged 50 yards on 4 punts.  Again, consistency is the watch word, but we are cautiously optimistic that he is rounding back into shape.  Jones fair caught several balls last night, which was the right decision, and had a couple of nifty runs.  It still scares the geewhilickers out of us that a player as valuable as he to our schemes even lines up at the position.  We stopped a fake punt that we were not really deployed to stop.  Arkansas returned two punts for 11 yards -- not average, total.  Hard not to rate that effort as excellent.

Kickoffs:  B.  We kicked off the football into the dadgum end zone three times.  Arkansas averaged only 16 yards per return on the shorter kicks.  The downgrade was for the decision to kick a pooch/sky kickoff giving the Razorbacks unnecessarily good field position and for the poorly played on-side kick, though it may be unfair to grade the team down for what were in actuality coaching decisions.

FG/XP:  C-.  I don’t know what to say y’all.  We were at the game.  After the homecoming halftime festivities were over, the queen and court introduced, the alma mater sung, etc., lonely Adam Griffith walked back onto the field and proceeded make at least four kicks that were as long or difficult as the one he missed just before the half ended.  Now, on field goal attempts approaching 50 yards long, we are inclined to give our kicker a break.  He was 2/4 on the day.  Exactly 50%.  Which is also more or less his average for the year.  Is that consistent?  Let’s hope not.  I start to believe that the coaches see him nail kick after kick during practice only to struggle in the actual games.  If you have spare rabbits foot, four leaf clover, Mercury dime, eye of newt, or the like lying around the house, please send it to Mr. Griffith, c/o the University athletic department.

Coaching:  C.  This set up to be a difficult coaching week.  The Georgia game was huge and emotional.  This team was never as bad as people said after the Mississippi game and probably not quite as good as some said after the Georgia game.  Coach Stallings has said several times over the years that despite what you imagine coaches cannot really get a college team primed to its tip top emotional level every single week.  I think he estimated 3-4 times a season was about the best you could do.  The coaching staff was not immune to the inconsistency bug that bit Alabama Saturday night.  The second quarter, in particular, featured play-calling that was, um, difficult to follow.  The scheme for recovering an on-side kick nearly cost us a possession.  We incur too many needless penalties on everything from the offensive line to kick returns….  We’ll stop, you saw the game and this is starting to make our back ache like spending too long bending over the mounting machine with a troublesome radial.

A microcosm of this is something we’ve noted before.  We got the ball back from Arkansas deep in our territory with about a minute and a half to go until half time.  It seemed there were two choices. First, we could decide that enough was enough, not take a chance on an injury or another turnover deep in our own territory, and go the locker room to regroup knowing that we’d get the ball to start the second half.  Second, we could run the two-minute drill -- mostly passes, get out of bounds, no huddle, run to the new line of scrimmage, etc.  It looked for all the world like we tried to do both, at the same time, and ended up trying a longish field goal having wasted a big chunk of time that would have been useful.

Also, we’d be remiss not to separately acknowledge that the defensive side of the ball is doing outstanding coaching work.  The scheme for Arkansas was just excellent. 

Officiating:  Speaking of inconsistent, more than one fan in the stadium was wondering aloud last night what we had done to make the officials mad at us.  And I overheard more than a few fans speculating that after Saban sent tapes of the Mississippi game to the league, we’d better expect to have “lineman downfield” on a pass play called against Alabama at least once a game.  Frankly, my personal rule is that whenever your choice is between “complex somewhat paranoid conspiracy” and “plain old incompetence”, go with incompetence every time.  After last night, I’m not so sure that rule applies here.  The flag on ineligible down field was (correctly) waved off, because the pass was completed behind the line of scrimmage.  Maybe they are treating everyone overzealously on this point now.  That does not explain the ridiculously ticky tack “unsportsmanlike conduct” penalty assessed on Ridley by Ken Williamson's crew. We’ve seen the replay several times and unless the officials overheard him saying something, and in the din resounding in Bryant Denny stadium immediately after that catch we’d say that was impossible, it was a pitiful, ok, almost spiteful, sort of call.  We’ve certainly seen far far worse, from our own players and opponents over the course of this season already that did not result in losing 15 yards for a kickoff.  Maybe it’s time for Coach Saban to bake the officiating crews some cookies or something.  Or just send a note that says, “I’m really, really, really, really, really, sorry for pointing out how incompetent you guys are.”

On the whole, however, Alabama managed to win the football game, avoid major injuries, and show that even on a night where it doesn’t give its best effort, it can still beat a more than respectable conference opponent.

Alabama must now find a way to shift mental and physical gears from consecutive weeks of playing smash-mouth, big-boy, pound-the-football games and go to College Station and play another one of these chicken-with-its-head-off offenses that arose after the play clock rule was changed a few years ago.  A team that was off this weekend to prepare (a common trait for each of the next three opponents.)  We’ll consistently hope this week for a more consistent performance that provides consistent winning results.

Roll Tide everyone.

The Correspondent from the Tire Store


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