It’s been no secret that over the past few seasons, Alabama’s defense has taken a bit of a slide in terms of performance, and last Saturday’s game against Ole Miss was the boiling point for fans as well as head coach Nick Saban.
Saban who has a reputation of turning out some of the best defenses in the country does not like to work through shootouts and that’s exactly what the Crimson Tide’s 63-48 victory was.
“I’m not really calm,” Saban said when asked about the nature of high scoring games during his postgame press conference. “I’m boiling and bubbling, trying to be encouraging to the players and try to make the best adjustments that we could make at halftime.”
Making adjustments is the name of the game when it comes to defense, and the ones that Saban and his staff have tried to implement recently have just not cut it.
This season Alabama’s defensive coordinator is Pete Golding who is now in his second season at that position, was already coming off of a season of struggle. In 2019, Golding’s first season as the signal caller, the Crimson Tide allowed record highs in the Saban era in points allowed (18.62), rushing yards(137.4) and total yards(324.6) three statistical areas the six-time national champion has prided his teams on.
But this season his defense is on track to exceed all of those numbers donning it statistically the worst defense of the Saban era.
Alabama’s 2020 Defensive stats:
Points allowed per game: 30.3
Rushing yards allowed per game: 150.7
Total yards allowed per game: 473
To be fair to Golding’s tenure, he has had to overcome significant injuries across his unit, along with a near complete overhaul of the secondary with only one starter returning. That’s a ton of moving parts for someone who had no prior experience as a Division I coordinator, yet Alabama has had to overcome these same circumstances in the past to much greater success.
Although these numbers are by no means acceptable for a team that possess national championship aspirations, a moderate uptick in these statistical categories should be expected with today’s offenses.
Now more than every, offenses are scoring more and more points all across the country and it has even made Saban admit that it is hard to slow down with all of the advantages.
“Well 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 running 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-fashioned offense. It’s spread. Lots of very difficult plays to defend. So we have to score a lot of points if we’re going to win. But we have to play better on defense, too.”
Defending offenses is unquestionably more difficult now, but there were still other pressing issues during Alabama’s game on Saturday. The players on the field looked consistently confused by the Ole Miss offense along with not being set a number of times before the ball was even snapped.
The unit also missed an abundance of tackles which would have resulted in major negative plays but kept letting the running backs and quarterback Matt Corral slip away and break tackles for big plays. Those kinds of plays are unacceptable and not necessarily on the coaching staff.
At some point it is on the players themselves to go out and execute the play call which is what Saban believes to be an issue this season.
“First of all, I don’t think the call is necessarily the issue,” Saban said. “I think the execution of the call has been the issue. Sometimes we coach players for what we want them to be. But we really need to coach them for what they are. And when I say that, I’m talking about how much experience do they have? How much can they handle? How much can they execute?
“So, if the players are mis-executing, that’s not a good thing from a coaching standpoint because that means we have to do a better job of teaching them or make sure we’re not trying to teach them too much so they go out there and can’t perform well with confidence and make plays we’d like for them to make.”
Whether it’s coaching or personnel Alabama needs to figure it out of defense and fast. If this type of play keeps up with difficult defenses like Georgia coming to town who may have a chance of slowing down the Crimson Tide’s offense, or maybe even a fifth matchup against a Clemson team who has much more talent than Ole Miss had on both sides of the football.
The coming games show if change can be possible during this irregular season.
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Patrick Dowd is a Reporter for Touchdown Alabama Magazine. You can follow him on Twitter, via Pat_Dowd77
