Former Alabama player grills departing linebacker on Tide’s lack of physicality vs. Indiana

Fans may have thought the Alabama-Indiana fallout couldn’t get any worse for the Crimson Tide, but it has.

Alabama linebacker and NFL prospect, Nikhai Hill-Green went on The Bama Standard on Tuesday, and there were some things said that raised eyebrows.

The topic of Alabama’s 35-point loss to Indiana in the Rose Bowl came up as former Alabama linebacker Reggie Ragland engaged in an intense conversation with Hill-Green as the Alabama linebacker was asked what Alabama needs to do to return to dominance.

Hill-Green said that Alabama cannot have another performance like the one the Crimson Tide had in the Rose Bowl, and he said they have to be nasty in the trenches. This led to Ragland offering what he saw from a physicality standpoint as well as a mindset standpoint.

“What I saw, at times, I felt like y’all weren’t physical a lot during the game,” Ragland said. “The Indiana game, I’m like, what the hell is going on? Even if you work your ass off and you missing plays, at least you can be physical out there and let them know you still there. I felt like once they got up, guys just said, shit, I’m cool. I’m gonna go get in my Benz and I’m gonna go home. That’s how I felt and that’s what I felt like I saw.”

After that, Hill-Green suggested there was a “pre-conceived notion” among Alabama players that Indiana was not going to be as physical as an SEC team.

“I will say this: because I’ve played in other conferences, I think there was a little bit of a sense of, this isn’t an SEC team,” Hill-Green said. “To a point, to a point. There was a little bit of that, I think. Like that pre-conceived notion of they’re not gonna be as physical as us, because they’re not an SEC team.”

Ragland’s retort was “I wasn’t saying when they play. I’m just saying you look like y’all didn’t come ready to be physical. That’s what it looked like from my point of view.”

Hill-Green highlighted that Indiana went on to win the National Championship and finished the season undefeated, but that almost sounds like a moral victory. The reality is that it does not take any criticism away from the team’s lack of physicality.

The conversation turned into a discussion of analytics as Hill-Green said Alabama “couldn’t call the game as aggressive against Indiana in those short-yardage” situations because of analytics and the fact that the Hoosiers had the Heisman Trophy winner (Fernando Mendoza) on their side.

Ragland shot right back by mentioning an Alabama Heisman Trophy winner that he had to face in practice.

“Yeah, and I had a Heisman running back [Derrick Henry]. I think different, dawg. The analytics shit don’t move me, the way I think and play the game. I don’t give a damn who out there. … It’s the mental side of it, dawg.”

Perhaps the most intriguing part of this whole exchange came towards the end when Ragland shared how him and his teammates spoke to each other at practice when he was on a few championship teams in the Nick Saban era.

“And the way we used to talk to each other at practice — I don’t know how y’all do — but shit, we’ll walk up to your ass and say, ‘Hey man, you playing like a b-i-t-c-h. You playing like a h**.’ We’ll walk up to you and tell that, but that’s the type of respect we had for one another, because we want to see each other be great.”

It was a disastrous final game of the season for Alabama, but this is ultimately what Hill-Green is going to take away from his one and only season at Alabama.

“We did something that no team has ever done,” Hill-Green said. “We beat the most ranked teams in a row [against Georgia, Vanderbilt, Missouri and Tennessee]. Nobody has ever done that. People keep talking about this killer instinct — what are you talking about? We beat the most ranked. Nobody has ever beaten that many ranked teams, and we did. Nobody did.”

The loss to Indiana is something that can either be a moment used for change in the Kalen DeBoer era, or it can be the pinpoint moment that the physical era of Alabama football died.