There’s no other way to put it, Alabama’s defense was awful last Saturday against Ole Miss.
Coming into this season the defense was a big area of concern, and up until now Pete Golding and company had done an adequate job against its opponents as it showed flashes of improvement. But Ole Miss essentially crushed every bit of progress made up with a 647-yard performance put up on the Crimson Tide.
There weren’t many bright spots to point to at all throughout the game as Lane Kiffin’s offense had its way through the air as well as on the ground. Alabama allowed 379 passing yards and 268 rushing yards with an average of 7.35 yards per play given up by the defense.
No team can consistently win that way, especially when you give up big yardage on third down which was an area head coach Nick Saban has been hammering the team to get better at.
Ole Miss converted on 9 of 17 third downs with a 52.9% success rate. But that isn’t the most appalling stat from those plays.
During the game, Ole Miss’ average third-down distance to gain was 8.8 yards essentially meaning that every time the offense converted it was in a favorable yardage situation for the defense. To dump some salt on the wound, Ole Miss was 2/4 on third and nine or more throughout the night averaged 19.8 yards per pass attempt on third and had 10 carries for 87 yards in those situations.
A popular question was raised all night because of the way the defense played.
Does Nick Saban need to move on from Pete Golding?
Maybe, maybe not.
What isn’t on Golding is the countless missed tackles throughout the game. There were multiple times that Alabama was in position to stop Ole Miss for a loss but either let Matt Corral slip out of the pocket and gain yards or flat out miss a stop on running backs Snoop Connor and Jerrion Ealy.
There was also a bad gamble by safety Daniel Wright which resulted in a 68-yard touchdown from tight end Kenny Yeboah who hurt them all night.
It’s also worth keeping in mind that Saban and middle linebacker Dylan Moses believed that Kiffin had the defense’s signals from years past when he served on Alabama’s staff as the offensive coordinator for three years. That doesn’t excuse the massive yardage and missed tackles by the unit, but it is an advantage situationally.
Saban also brought up in his post-game press conference that offenses are allowed many more advantages nowadays than compared to years past.
“I think there’s a lot of advantages to the offense,” Saban said. “The quarterback runs a quarterback draw. The offensive line is blocking a run play. They throw a pop pass to the tight end. I don’t know if there’s anybody downfield or not. It’s hard to play RPOs. Every time you play middle-of-the-field coverage they run RPOs, so they’re running slants. It’s bang-bang plays but they’re 10-yard plays.
“But then you try to play other things to take that away, and it’s hard to stop the run. So, I think the offense that we have in college football right now is very, very difficult to defend. Not any old-fashion offense. It’s spread, lots of very difficult plays to defend. So, we’ve gotta score a lot of points if we’re gonna win, but we have play better on defense, too.”
Although offenses have certainly been given advantages over the defense in roughly the past decade, having to score 63 points in order to scrape by with a win can not be the standard for a championship-caliber team.
Changes need to happen on defense in order to be able to win the SEC, let alone win the College Football Playoff.
It’s going to start in the film room and the practice field, zeroing in on finishing tackles and situationally stopping offenses.
It’d be unprecedented for Saban to make a coaching switch just three games into a season, but with Alabama’s continued struggles on defense the pressure is mounting and the players and staff will need to respond quickly.
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Patrick Dowd is a Reporter for Touchdown Alabama Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter, via Pat_Dowd77
