Alabama’s Ryan Williams grabs a 13-yard touchdown pass from Ty Simpson late in the first half against LSU Saturday night to give the Tide a 17-3 lead at Bryant-Denny Stadium. (UA Athletics)
Alabama safety Bray Hubbard comes off the edge to slam LSU running back Harlem Berry Saturday night in Tuscaloosa. (UA Athletics)
TUSCALOOSA — It is a testament to the prodigious standard of Alabama football that nobody expressed satisfaction with Saturday night’s 20-9 win over unranked LSU, which was treated like the Crimson Tide’s worst game since the season-opening loss to Florida State that nearly got coach Kalen DeBoer fitted for a metaphorical noose.
“I’m not satisfied with the way we played at times,” said DeBoer, who has become the poster child for patience and has gone on to be the only surviving cast member of the Jack’s hamburger commercial he filmed with former Auburn coach Hugh Freeze. “There’s some plays out there we’ve got to make but for the most part, if you find a way to win, that’s what matters.”
The defense held LSU to just three field goals and a season low in points, which is fine, but it wasn’t acceptable that Alabama’s Conor Talty had to kick a couple himself and missed another.
Quarterback Ty Simpson completed 21 of 35 passes for 277 yards, including a 13-yard touchdown to Ryan Williams, but in the postgame he seemed on the verge of throwing up because he wasn’t 35 of 35.
“It is what it is — not great, not what I wanted, but a win’s a win,” said Simpson, who never got into a rhythm because the Tide’s running game, if you can call it that, missed the bus to Bryant-Denny Stadium and finished with 56 yards. The longest gain by a running back was a mere seven yards. Unfortunately, Jackson five-star running back E.J. Crowell won’t be on campus until next year.
“Fifty-six yards, so that needs to be better,” DeBoer said. “I think there’s a lot of things that would help open up the box a little bit but we’ve got to do a better job blocking and a good job of being physical with the ball in our hands. We’ve got to do a better job giving lanes for the running back to go hit it confidently and hit it hard.”
Simpson bluntly declared Alabama’s running game isn’t scaring anyone except for the Tide’s coaches.
“We’re not very confident that we can run the ball very well right now,” he said. “It’s all mental, really. We’ve got a good scheme. We’ve got the great players, right?”
Simpson wasn’t pleased with himself either. For a quarterback who has spent most of the year throwing a straw into a thimble full of water at 50 yards and treating third down like a first-grade spelling bee, the performance — which included some near misses on deep balls, a sack, five hurries and, according to the man himself, poor footwork and mechanics — was quite un-Tysmanlike.
“I’m going to be brutally honest — that’s not up to our standard and everybody knows that,” Simpson said with a faraway stare after scoring a season-low 20 points and converting just 4 of 13 third downs. “We need to tell the truth and look in the mirror. It starts with me, it starts with our run game. We’re going to get it right. This week of practice is going to be a great week, I promise you that.”
Alabama — still the only team in SEC history to beat four straight ranked opponents without an open date — is ranked No. 4 in the College Football Playoff pecking order but to be assured a home game in the postseason, the Tide must still beat Oklahoma at home next week and win at Auburn on Nov. 29 — and that might not be as easy as was once thought now that Freeze is watching more videos about the backswing than game tape and presumably using his Jack’s coupons before they expire.
It’s astonishing what a change in coaches can do, even deep into the season. Under interim coach Frank Wilson, LSU suddenly played like it was expected to this year (“That’s a good defense,” Simpson said) and Auburn’s D.J. Durkin nearly pulled off an upset of Vanderbilt — and let us pause now to let that phrase sink in. Only mild applause rippled across Saban Field when the highlights of the Tigers’ 45-38 overtime loss to the Commodores were shown during a timeout. The fans realized Auburn could now make Alabama’s visit to Jordan-Hare Stadium very uncomfortable.
The midseason coaching casualties in the SEC are piling up as corpses on a beachhead — Arkansas’ Sam Pittman, Florida’s Billy Napier, LSU’s Brian Kelly and Freeze are already gone and South Carolina’s Shane Beamer and Kentucky’s Mark Stoops will likely follow. Alabama is lucky to be where it is now compared to barely more than two months ago, when many Tide fans wanted DeBoer to be the first body on that heap. He’s only 19-3 against the AP Top 25.
Were all those coaches bad or just in a bad circumstance? At some point they were all considered the right answer at their school and had the confidence of their employer.
What do all of these firings in the middle of a shift mean for the future of the sport? Since the criteria in the SEC is for each team to go undefeated and make the College Football Playoff, there are not enough good coaches to go around to make such outlandish expectations a reality. Success is measured in the richness of the payroll and importing players who can win right away instead of being developed. Daniel Moore should go around to all the campuses and start painting scenes of players cashing checks. Call it “The Gold Line Stand.”
For what it’s worth — and apparently, it’s a lot — the Tide’s defense is giving folks their money’s worth.
“They keep getting better,” DeBoer said. “There’s less of the explosive plays where one guy makes a mistake or doesn’t fit a gap. We’re seeing less and less of that.”
Alabama linebacker and former Mobile Christian star Deontae Lawson said the defensive line is playing so well that it’s fouling up his reads.
“I could barely read my run-pass indicators because they get in the backfield so fast,” said Lawson, who led the way with nine tackles against LSU. “No doubt this is a championship defense. We have all the right guys and we’ve got a great scheme. … Any SEC game is not easy to win but we know we left a lot of meat on that bone.”
That defense will give the Tide a good chance to make up for last year’s 24-3 loss at Oklahoma but Simpson doesn’t want to be biting his nails.
“That whole game just felt spooky to be honest and I don’t want to have that feeling again, especially at our house with a lot at stake,” he said. “We kind of took them for granted. We thought we were just going to go in there and steamroll them.”
It won’t matter if Alabama beats the Sooners by three or by 30. The Tide is finding ways to win, something it didn’t do enough of last year, and a victory over OU will provide plenty of style points no matter the margin.
