Questions about defense on Saturday

I was just thinking about this. For all the "offensive play calling sucks" threads and comments, I blame the defense more. This is two weeks in a row that we've been torched. What the hell happpened to us? Was it just that we inflated our stats against inferior opponents and when we finally played two decent teams, they lit us up and exposed something that had been there all along?

One thing I've noticed a lot this year is that in the games where we blew out our opponents, the other team made a lot of mistakes (missing wide open people, penalties in key situations, etc). That may have hidden our defects. When we actually played against a good QB that didn't make mistakes and WR that caught the ball, we seemed to be out of position--a lot. On a lot of the catches Saturday, the WR were wide open in the middle of the field. And a lot of those were the third down plays.

I guess it's more like we thought going into the season than it was after we saw them play a few games. We really are young. We really did lose some fantastic players. These guys just aren't there yet and playing inferior opponents early in the season who did not execute well or take care of the football, really inflated how good our defense really is.


I hope this is a wake up call for the Defense. Offensive play calling be damned, if we can keep the other team from scoring we will win most of our games. We just can't do that right now for whatever reason (youth, experience, mental mistakes, athleticism (Sunseri)).

Offense killed us for the first three series. Not a defensive issue. Mac missed easy toss to Coop.

The defense definitely got Bama in a hole, but I still think they did their job well enough the rest of the game for Bama to win.

The offense is supposed to be the strength of the team this year. Every once in a while (like basically once every 2 years or so) the offense needs to be able to score 30 points to win a game. Texas A&M has a very hard offense to defend and they played a flawless 1st quarter with a couple of breaks (e.g., the Manziel fumble straight up into the air and back down to him scramble TD pass). On the other hand, Texas A&M has an average defense. This was the one game Alabama's offense need to pick up the slack (God knows the defense has done it consistently for 5 years running now) and score 30 in a competitive game.

The offense and defense both take considerable blame, but I tend to blame the offense more mostly because they are really hardly ever required to score more than a couple of TDs to win a game, and this is the one they needed to step up and help the defense out.

With all that said, A&M played a very good, mistake free game and Bama really didnt. Sometimes the other teams just gets you.