The SEC Media Days were in full swing today, and we got plenty of soundbites from Georgia, Auburn, Tennessee, and Texas.
Auburn
“That’d be awesome,” Arnold said of the chance to break the Crimson Tide’s streak. “All the dudes on the team talked about, even the old fifth-year senior guys still haven’t beaten Alabama. They came close twice but they haven’t beaten them yet, so for those guys, I want to get a win.”
Arnold compared the game to the Texas-Oklahoma rivalry he was previously part of.
“OU-Texas, it’s very similar,” Arnold said. “Honestly, it’s not far off. I feel those two rivalries are probably the two best rivalries in college football. But I feel like if you mention Alabama here, somebody would look at you funny. We even have a rule in our facility, you can’t wear red in our facility at all. If you do, you lose points and you have to do up-downs.”
Now, some of the old talk surfaced again Tuesday. In the same breath and sentence following the playoff line, Freeze regressed a little.
“Now, we’ve got to stay healthy and we need the ball to bounce our way a couple times this year instead of against us,” Freeze said. “I’m sure, but that’s our full expectation.”
Kinda simplifying things. But OK
“We should have won or could have won some games last year,” he said going back to a greatest hit before recovering. “And we’ve done everything in our power to evaluate why that happened and what we can do better as coaches and then get more pieces to the puzzle with more and more players.”
Listen, they’re all just words at this point.
Everyone is close to talked out and we’ve almost reached a breaking point in finding meaning in these comments.
Well Auburn is already in midseason form, with their head man already pumping sunshine and saying they should be a playoff team, but need the universe to stop making them unlucky. Never change, Hugh.
Georgia
Georgia Bulldogs coach Kirby Smart addressed those rumors on Tuesday, cracking a joke about Saban returning while poking fun at reports that suggested defensive analyst Will Muschamp was no longer on the coaching staff.
“I called him and offered him [assistant coach] Will Muschamp’s job, but he was overqualified and wasn’t interested,” Smart said at SEC media day. “I heard all of the scuttlebutt and everything about it. I almost laughed. It was like somebody needed something interesting to talk about yesterday, so they chose to go to Coach Saban to do it.”
Though Smart said the game is better with Saban in it and that the longtime Crimson Tide coach is still involved and passionate about football, he does not believe Saban will return to coaching.
“That’s not happening. I don’t think Nick’s coming back. I think he’s too happy where he is,” Smart said, via The Athletic. “I have talked to Nick pretty regularly and I just don’t see it. It’s one of those things that if he wanted to, he’d be unbelievable at it.”
Smart also added that if Saban were considering a return to coaching, the decision would be up to his wife, Terry. “Make no mistake about it, the boss at home is going to make that call for him, not him,” Smart said.
Kirby Smart also got a quick shot in when they asked him about Greg McElroy’s comments the other day about Nick Saban possibly returning to coaching. And seriously, can you imagine Nick being the defensive coordinator under Kirby Smart? It would be like an alternate reality, but man, that could very well wind up being the best defense college football has ever seen.
Texas
Sarkisian runs the Texas offense, so he wasn’t directly coaching against Grubb. But as head coach of the Longhorns, and a play-calling expert, Sarkisian is about as good as anyone outside of Grubb’s staff to provide a scouting report of the Grubb offense.
“They had a really good passing team,” Sarkisian said Tuesday at SEC Media Days. “(Quarterback) Michael Penix. The receivers. Definitely an attack-oriented group that’s going to attack you vertically with shots down the field. Going to tax you from the screen game. Multiple shifts, formations, things that challenge you that way. It’s definitely a pro style approach where the quarterback is going to have his opportunities to take his shots down the field.”
Thanks for the support, Sark.
Look, I’ve expressed my concerns about Ryan Grubb as an OC after his stint in Seattle last year. This is a guy that, every week, talked about running the ball and then turned around and passed at the 2nd highest rate in the NFL. It ultimately got him fired by a head coach that wanted to run the ball.
For his faults with finding a run/pass balance (and the predictability that came with that), Grubb’s passing route concepts were phenomenal, and it’s an offense that can do a whole lot of damage in the medium-long passing game with a QB that can push the ball downfield. We’ll see how it goes.
Like many, Pate believes good decision making from the quarterback, presumably Ty Simpson, and a commitment to running the ball is where it starts.
“I don’t see many weaknesses with them,” he said. “It may not be that they are A+ across the board … (but) I look at Alabama and say, ‘I don’t know what’s going to keep them from it.’”
Pass rush, for example, he said, may not dominate across the board but cumulatively can get it done.
“They have a shot to be the best receiving corps in the league,” Pate said. “One of. They have a chance to have the best defensive back room in the league. One of.”
As always, this team will likely go as the QB goes. The Tide had one of the best defenses in the country last year (and arguably their best since 2017), and, on paper, that should only improve as most of the group is coming back.
But, as I mentioned above, this offense requires high-level QB play… And to this point, Ty Simpson is mostly an unknown. He made one beautiful seam pass a couple of years ago before Kadyn Proctor tried to get him killed in Tampa, and he’s made some nice scramble plays in mop up duty the last two seasons, but outside of that, we still don’t know much of what the former 5-star has in him.
“We felt like he could distribute the ball [with Jalen Milroe] as a passer, but it was tough at times trying to get a run game going other than the quarterback a year ago,” he told Tide 100.9 radio on Tuesday. “There’s a lot of reasons for that.”
DeBoer did not elaborate on those reasons, but noted that even though Ty Simpson, Austin Mack and Keelon Russell have mobility as part of their styles, none have the athleticism and running ability of Milroe.
“We felt like we had to manufacture a lot of our run game that way a year ago,” he continued.
The offense that DeBoer and offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb ran at Washington in 2022 and 2023 was among the most pass-heavy, and most prolific, in college football. But DeBoer believes despite his reputation for having a pass-first system, the running game remains important.
“The run game is critical to our success,” he said. “It helps open up the play-action pass, which those who have followed what we have done, there’s always a vertical passing attack. That can be drop back but a lot of that is also play action. If there’s no threat of a run game, then that’s not gonna have the same impact as far as opening up windows to throw the ball in the second and third level down the field.
“I always feel like being balanced doesn’t mean that when you look at the stats at the end of a game or a season that it’s equal as far as yardage is concerned. To me, balanced means you have the ability to take what the defense gives you. If a team is doing everything they can to take the passing game away, you have the ability to run the football and vice versa.
“That’s what we’ve always had and have made our team successful, our offense successful.”
Hey look, we’ve got a theme for the Jumbo Package today!
Kalen DeBoer also addressed Alabama’s lack of a run game last season. It was a disjointed mess as Nick Sheridan tried to take his version of Grubb’s offense and tailor it to a very different QB style. To Sheridan’s credit, Milroe was a more effective ball carrier than any of Alabama’s running backs, so not using that would have been folly (looking at you, Tommy Rees). However, it also led to predictability and an extreme dependence on one single player, and I think that affected Milroe, both physically and mentally, down the stretch in both individual games and the whole season.
In 2023, Washington did have a 1000 yard rusher at running back even with the passing game fireworks, so it’ll be interesting to see if DeBoer and Grubb can recapture that. And even if the scheme is more conducive, does Alabama have the personnel? The offensive line has underwhelmed, and the running backs did not create much last year.
How they approach establishing the offensive identity will speak a lot towards their coaching style going forward, as opposed to trying to force a poor fit last season.
