re: Kiffen would have been the right play. It's true. I fear Deboer is smoke and mirrors.

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Kiffen would have been the right play. It's true. I fear Deboer is smoke and mirrors.

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My analysis on DeBoer is not quite a dire but I have concerns. The most important thing to get out of the way is recognizing that Saban left DeBoer with an awful situation on offense. Clearly they had been missing evals and/or failing to develop players across every offensive position. To add insult to injury, the best returning skill player bounced for a payday to end up as WR3 on Texas.

The new staff was not going to fix our problems on the offensive line in one offseason. The WR and RB situation is so dire that we've lost around 8 of them to the portal this Winter and nothing of value was lost. QB room situation needs no explanation. It's bad. Nobody DeBoer inherited was ready to play his offense and they just had to make something up to squeeze the most they could out of the best athlete in the QB room.

I'm willing to throw out my grade for offensive performance because I think this was reminiscent of 2007 where our OL lacked the physicality to run Saban's preferred scheme at the time, so we were a pass heavy team with mediocre receivers and average quarterback.

The defense got much better over the course of the season. I think that was partly because the player evaluations and development on that side of the ball that the new staff inherited was closer to the Saban standard. Once the DC found a playcalling groove after being out of playcalling for years and the players got familiar with the scheme, performance stabilized.

However my big concerns are the player discipline on the field and the staff's gameday management/decision making. The player discipline has cost Alabama games this season and kept others needlessly close. Additionally, there are a litany of tactical decisions or prep issues that I feel like the prior regime would have done differently and was closer to what the "book" says to do in those situations. I think our staff did not handle the end of the South Carolina game correctly and it almost cost them. Sellers should have never touched the ball again. However, Bernard was not coached to stop short of the goal line after catching a 3rd and long 1st down. Just things like that and others like it...