re: Defensive adjustment

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Go back to mount Cody in the middle will leaner defensive ends?

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No, we abandoned that scheme immediately after the 2013 season. We've been 2-gap up front ever since, and won't be going back to lineman that size. They've been phased out of modern CFB by the spread/hurry up.

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what kinds of adjustments do you see needing to be made in order to deal with modern offenses?

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I don't think we need to change anything schematically. In the secondary, everyone that matters has copied Saban's pattern matching stuff, and so we've been and are the standard schematically on the back end.

The only "changes" we need to make is to get better players and keep them in Tuscaloosa longer. Too many guys leave early, and it robs us of getting lengthy contributions from these guys while they're upperclassmen.

Our defensive gameplan was hurt by one thing more than anything else this year - extreme youth at ILB. This literally meant that a chunk of the playbook is missing when designing gameplans during game week, and a DC's ability to adjust midgame is severely limited -limited to only what has been installed up to that point in the season. And even late in the season, it's still a small fraction of the playbook that would be available to make adjustments if the ILBs had been upperclassmen.

We just need to recruit and develop players to the best of our staff's ability, and hopefully have our units on both sides of the football littered with experienced players. And keep them in TTown as long as possible.

Richt was on Finebaum a day or 2 ago, and while talking shop, waxed lyrical on how much easier it is to make in-game schematic adjustments if the players are experienced/upper classmen, and how difficult it is to adjust to what a team is doing midgame if the players are young. Said it was night and day, paraphrasing his words, obviously.

Personally, I'd like to see us blitz more, but that's predicated on having good, experienced players who can play on islands.