re: Bully Ball

Hard to be truly dominant on the DL when a few schools are buying all the best DL/DE's up.

I respect your take but it’s another example of what I have been saying that there are many more moving parts to our football program than merely W’s and L’s, our fan base has been conditioned for generations, long before Saban, that Bama does things a certain way and espouses certain values on and off the field.

A poster here the other day actually was bemoaning the fact that we are prioritizing W’s and L’s above all these days.

The problem with that bemoaning is that W’s and L’s are what determines who gets to play for the big trophy. And if that’s not the reason we’re all here … someone else was bemoaning that it’s no longer about turning boys into men although I don’t know how a mere football coach turns boy millionaires into men … then I don’t know what to say.

And from my strictly amateur view we’ve had about as rugged a spread O since we shifted over as it’s possible to have,

I do agree that we can't just impose our will like we did pre-Tua. I do think that we are better at it this year for the exact reasons Saban has discussed in years past - we don't really run a whole lot of RPO. Most of our run game is either a true run or a read option, and either way the OL knows its a run. Saban used to talk about how moving to an RPO centric system makes it impossible for linemen to be good at pure power run blocking because they just never practice it or do it in games. The last 2 years we've gone away from RPO stuff (mainly because Jalen is a disaster at it) and it feels like we've slowly built back up some of that ability to knock teams off the ball.

quote:

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It's worth noting that in the fourth quarter of the Auburn game, Alabama drained almost eight minutes off the clock with a drive that started on our own three-yard line. Some passes were included, but the bulk of the plays were runs.

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That drive, the 2nd half of Tennessee last year and the last drive of the UGA SECCG game last year are as close to old school impose your will Alabama run games as I can remember us rolling out in 5-6 years. The 2nd half vs Missouri this year is up there as well. In all of those situations they knew we were gonna run, we knew we were gonna run, and we just moved them backwards anyways.

We ran all over LSU the last 2 years but their run defense is a joke.

...but Vandy dropped a 40 sot on us... f'n Vandy... that has NEVER happened. That isn't the result of parity, it's the result of lack of attention to detail by the staff and players. I give the coaches some leeway to acclimate to the SEC and the standard we have here, but the money these players are getting is surely diverting their focus. This is where true coaches will excel. We just have to hope these coa he's are up to the task.