re: #11 Jihaad Campbell needs to be benched for the season

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These same players looked pretty damn excellent a year ago playing in a Saban/Steele defense.

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Jihad has never been a great linebacker. He occasionally made a big play, but he was the same guy last year. Just most of the folks assumed he was really good because he was a 5 star and made a few plays

The guy is made of glass.

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Jihad has never been a great linebacker. He occasionally made a big play, but he was the same guy last year. Just most of the folks assumed he was really good because he was a 5 star and made a few plays

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Agree 1000%

He makes certain plays dut to his athleticism and people make the assumption he is good at LB and get defensive when he gets criticized

The guy is absolutely terrified of taking direct contact, doesn't read what is going on in the backfired so can't anticipate to make plays and also struggles to tackle low (scared of direct contact).

Pretty much the only highlights of Campbell are of him running parallel to the LOS and making a tackle. Hes not doing much vertical to the LOS. No one fears him. He might run you down by the sideline though.

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Lawson pushed a guy on the back rather than making a tackle at one point in the game.

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I purposely waited a day to comment.

Something is horribly, horribly wrong on defense right now.

How many plays did the LBs show the kind of basic option discipline you’d see at the high school level? Inside LB attacks Pavia and forces him to commit and the outside LB sits on the pitch guy. Georgia State had it figured out pretty well without a single player who’d make our two deep.

And why the hell were we running exotic 3 man fronts against that offense in the first place? Was there a single series where we had a schematic advantage defensively? This isn’t Indiana. You have a top three defensive roster in the country. Line them up, make them play their man or bench them.

It’s not easy to play against an option team as a LB, but the lack of effort and execution at times for Campbell and Lawson was shocking. Neither was perfect last year, but they were absolutely high level guys for the most part last year.

And then there’s Malachi Moore. The guy went from being a 5th year captain with 4 years under Nick Saban to looking like he’s a freshman playing for Deion at Colorado in 5 games. It’s bad enough he’s been getting beat deep, but he was an embarrassment to the school with his actions.

That was the worst I’ve seen a Bama defense look as far as fundamentals going back to the Shula era. It was like I’d turned on the wrong game and was watching a CUSA game.

I had no expectation that things would just continue on without hiccups, but that was a systemic failure on defense.

My gut tells me we slept on Vandy as a for sure win. You could see it in our guys face when they were getting blown off the ball and beat deep. They were frustrated and tired. Saban said it best, hard week of practice easy game, easy week of practice hard game. On the tail end of that comment our coaches did absolutely nothing to better the situation either. At half Womack should have said frick it, and started sending the house. Instead he allowed our Def to be punished to another 2 quarters.