re: **tOfficial NC Game Thread: Alabama - 16 vs. Clemson - 44** End..Bama loses

I posted this in another thread and wanted to add it here. I’m not sure it was all on Tosh..

From Sabans presser..

“ Well, I thought that if we were going to have an opportunity, the best way to defend them is to rush four guys and play different kinds of coverages, and when we rushed four guys, we didn't get a lot of pressure. Their offensive line did a good job. He was very comfortable in the pocket, had time to throw, and we didn't get him covered very well in the back end at times....”


Sounds to me like Saban had a lot to do with this game planning on defense. Not sure all blame can be on Tosh. Saban promoted Tosh and knew he had to step in.. its been awhile since Saban has had to do that. Might be Saban was rusty too.. he is human. Look at the fake field goal. Saban thought our DBs needed help covering and it was a mismatch so he kept more back and rushed less..

“ But particularly in this case, never really ever got comfortable with what we needed to do to win this game, especially on defense, especially the match-ups we had in our secondary versus their receivers. That was something that was kind of bothering me going into the game, and as the game unfolded, it worked out that those match-ups were a big difference in the game...”

Clemson followed Miss State’s game plan... blitz off the corner and throw in delay blitzes up the middle every so often. Confused our line and Tua. We still were gashing them on the run.. but for some reason we didn’t take what they were giving us again. It haunted us all year. The check downs were there and the run game was working. I feel The beginning of the season killed us with it being so easy. We got use to scoring fast and easy. Grinding drives just didn’t happen much. We should have slowed the game down like we did late in the first. 2 more of those long scoring drives and we would have had Clemson pushing instead of us. Their D line was tired after the first and we didn’t capitalize. We never really changed our D either.. for once Saban was scared putting our DB on a island and safeties had to stay in coverage.. The match ups were bad.. Ross is too big for a 50/50 ball.