That’s a great set of The Grades,
Commissioner. Taking a quick glance at
the calendar, we are surprised to learn that the regular college football
season is now one-third over for the University of Alabama. In an odd sort of way, despite having played
two conference games, including one on the road, it feels like this season is
at its very beginning.
Offense: We aren’t as worried about our
running game as lot of the folks around us seemed to be. Basically, Ruggs’ long TD run was a running
play -- if the quarterback had wanted to hand it to him instead of flipping it
to him, he could have. That would have
pumped up the totals. It looked to us
like the A&M strategy was to stop our run game and force us to beat them
with the passing game. Perhaps a questionable gambit. Now, that
strategy may have been driven by the fact that they didn’t have the players to
stop our passing game. Whichever, for a
decent part of the afternoon we seemed content to run running backs at the center
of the line where they had stacked the box and called run blitzes, while the
clock melted down. We could have run
outside effectively all day, y’all. And
if we knew it, the coaches knew it.
We do love the way this team plays
for each other. Jalen and Tua are
well-documented. On Ruggs’ long TD run,
Josh Jacobs brushed back one defender on a block where we thought, “hm, that
wasn’t much of an eff…” and before we could finish the thought he had knocked
some kid literally off his feet to spring the play. Which was fitting, because on Jacob’s
waltz-untouched-over-the-goal play, Ruggs was the one who sealed the end for
him.
And credit to pass catching phenom
Hale Hentges. This guy was levelling
Aggie defenders all day long and was rewarded with two touchdown
receptions. He was mobbed by his
teammates.
We definitely have work to do on the
interior offensive line. It was
encouraging that Womack was doing warm up drills to help with depth. Make no mistake, though, y’all. If Alabama had wanted to put 50 or 60 on
Texas A&M, it wouldn’t have been much of a stretch.
Defense: There’s not really a lot to talk
about here, outside of the pretty good A&M quarterback. He made us miss several times (I do wonder
about how often we practice actually sacking the quarterback, rather than just
getting to him). However, every team in
football that I know about is in for difficult times if the other team’s
quarterback is a threat to elude the rush and run for 20 - 30 yards. Frankly, there aren’t a lot of them out
there. Besides that, the stop troops
pretty well shut them down. Mond had a less
than 50% completion rate for just under 6 yards per attempt with two
interceptions (one of which was a beautiful reaction play by Wilson and the
other a fingertip catch worthy of WR status by Surtain). Mond had 98 rushing yards; the rest of the
team had 32.
Special
Teams: Kick coverage
and kick returning appear to be fine.
Ruggs catching the punt on the fly at the one-yard line while looking up
into a very high sky was a great play. Bulovas
seems to kickoff through the end zone every time he is allowed. His PATs don’t necessarily look pretty, but
so far they have all been credited with one point, so we don’t really care if
they are uglier than green rims on a blue Cadillac. You could hear the crowd hold its breath on
the long field goal to end the half, but it looked and was good. I will say there was sort of a jealous round
of appreciation when their kicker nailed that 50-yarder -- he had plenty to
spare.
We just don’t understand why our punter is trying to do that rugby style kick it on the run off the point of the ball trick. He just looks uncomfortable, like he’s testing out some new cleats or something. When he just stands back there and hits it, he can drill it. The issue is the consistency. In addition to that beauty of a punt that Ruggs caught, he also put one out of bounds that he got 13 yards' credit for, but we think that was just bad officiating. He didn’t kick it much further than that guy in the kilt who was kicking for tuition.
Maybe when the weather turns cooler
all the parts of the kicking game will work on the same day. Maybe.
Coaching: He won’t admit it and we wouldn’t ask
him, but Coach Saban was pretty clear that he wasn’t going to run the score up
on Jimbo. That’s fine. And we are proud that our coach has the class
to call off the elephants and isn’t the sort of fellow who’d take advantage of
someone if they did him that favor.
Jimbo, not so much. Those last
two time outs had the crowd hooting and hollering. You know, he should have seen that
game last year where FSU left their starting quarterback in after the issue was
decided, got him injured, and ruined their season so badly their coach had to up
and get out of town before…. Hey, wait
a minute.
Officiating: Well.
We have to say that was a good officiating effort by a bunch of guys who
were pulled off the street at the last minute and were calling the first
football game they ever saw. You have to
give a crew of volunteers like that the benefit of the doubt. Otherwise, if this group even claimed to be
experienced, highly-qualified officials who were, in fact, assigned to call the
conference’s premier game of the week on a national broadcast, you’d laugh if
you weren’t so busy crying. And this was
a little bit of everything -- missed calls, phantom calls, misunderstanding the
rules…. Either these guys correctly
understand the rule for starting the play clock on change of possession and
everyone else in the NCAA is doing it wrong, or, well, we are getting irritated
all over again. It’s to the point where
the players and coaches just look at each other and kind of shrug -- like the
day J.D., the mechanic, called in sick and Pee Wee from the alignment machine
tried to put a new starter in his mother’s car.
We knew it wasn’t going to work out, but it’s not like we had an option.
If you were going to send a tape of
their errors to the SEC Office, which teams are allowed to do, there isn’t much
need to edit it, just send the whole game film.
It’s going to be another one of those years during bowl season where a
couple of unsuspecting teams from the Sunbelt and the ACC get assigned SEC
officials and we are inclined to send both teams an apology card before the
start of the game.
Gameday: It’s a long story, but we were lucky
enough to attend this week’s game, sort of at the last minute. Some thoughts from around campus and game
day. The new metal
detector system is a disaster. Getting into the stadium was painfully,
painfully slow. First, it was 8 million degrees. Then, it rained
hard, twice. Some places were worse than others. The west side was
the very worst, we hear, with some sections not full till halfway through the
first quarter. With a surly crowd building up, I watched them send the
old man ahead of me (who was about as much of threat to be packing heat to
shoot up the stadium as that teeny tiny cheerleader they put on top of the
pyramid and toss 20 feet up on the sky and catch with one arm) back through the
metal detector four times before they figured out it was the “Roll Tide” button
pinned to his shirt that was setting it off. People were picking up and
carrying their kids because of the pushing and shoving. Our
recommendation is that if you are going to a game, get there a lot early. Last Saturday, being in line an hour and ten
minutes before kickoff was not early enough.
Campus is beautiful. The facility team is doing a great job. New buildings blend in with the old. Some old buildings that didn’t used to fit in
have been given a facelift. The core of campus around the Quad is still just
like we remember when we first saw it back in, well, just never you mind how long ago. It wasn’t this century. And it wasn’t the last quarter of the last
century, if that helps.
Texas A&M travelled pretty
well. Their fans were friendly enough
and knowledgeable about their football, though they still speak in pretty
glowing terms about Johnny Manziel, who we do think is still out of
prison. Once in a while they holler “Whoooooo”
kind of without any rhyme or reason and talk about what is and isn’t “good bull”,
but they make nice guests. We hope to
get out to College Station some day and several of them invited us to return
the trip.
Roll Tide. Beat Louisiana Tech/Louisiana
University.
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