TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — According to University of Alabama football coach Nick Saban, one of the problems that the Crimson Tide defense had at Tennessee last Saturday was playing against a quarterback it hadn’t prepared to face.

Alabama knew that senior quarterback Justin Worley had been practicing, but might not play due to a shoulder injury. Redshirt freshman Nathan Peterman was the only other quarterback to play this season, and everyone knew that the Tennessee coaches wanted to redshirt Joshua Dobbs.

Saban told reporters on Tuesday evening that the coaching staff didn’t know that Tennessee would likely use Dobbs until Thursday night, after the Crimson Tide had completed all of its practices. The team only had a walkthrough of the game plan on Friday, which was also a travel day.

“They basically ran a combination of Auburn and Mississippi State’s offense that we didn’t practice for at all,” Saban said. “So everything that we practiced for in the game, they didn’t do. Our players really had to do a lot of adjusting in the game. We probably could have done a better job of helping them adjust in the game. So we all take responsibility for not being able to stop the quarterback runs, which we had not worked on, and those are plays that you really do have to work on. You really do. There’s an extra runner in the game. You have to work on those. You have to call certain things, and we didn’t do that.

“It was really good planning on their part, and it was poor preparation on our part. But at the same time, you can’t prepare for a ghost that you have no idea is going to happen.”

Tennessee started Peterman behind a battered offensive line and while facing a lot of early pressure he completed just 2 of 4 passes for 10 yards. Coach Butch Jones inserted the dual-threat Dobbs after two possessions when Alabama already had a 13-0 lead.

Dobbs, who played in last year’s 45-10 loss at Alabama, completed 19 of 32 passes for 192 yards with two touchdowns and tallied 75 rushing yards – including a 30-yard scamper in the second quarter.

“They tried to go fast a lot, but it wasn’t a shock at all,” said senior linebacker Trey DePriest, who will essentially see nothing but uptempo spread offenses the rest of the regular season.