Alabama didn’t have its best performance against Texas A&M on Saturday night.

Sure, the Tide left College Station with a 27-19 victory over the Aggies, who were 4-1 coming in, but the Tide made some uncharacteristic mistakes.

One of the positives, however, was the continued emergence of the pass rush, which had seemingly been non-existent before the Week 5 game against Ole Miss.

Alabama had five sacks in its first four games. Only three came from a position typically known for getting after the quarterback — the interior defensive line or the edge rushers in the Tide’s 3-4 defense.

With that being said, Alabama has almost tripled the amount of generated sacks over the course of the past two weeks. Last week against the Rebels, the Tide added five to the total. Saturday night, they added four more.

The most encouraging aspect against the Aggies was that two of the younger defensive linemen, redshirt freshman Quinnen Williams and true freshman LaBryan Ray, got in on the action.

When Da’Shawn Hand went down with a knee injury against the Rebels, the depth along Alabama’s front seven took another major blow, but seeing Williams and Ray step up will help alleviate some of that lost production.

Here’s a look at Ray’s first sack, which included a strong bull rush off the edge:

Alabama has 14 sacks this season, and of those, more are coming from the defensive line and edge rushers.

It’s still a far cry from last season, when the line generated 82.4 percent of the team’s 54 sacks — which led the country — but that’s not surprising when you consider that group had Jonathan Allen, Tim Williams, Ryan Anderson and Dalvin Tomlinson, who combined for 31.5 of those.

Alabama is on pace for just 28 sacks in a 12-game regular season, which, overall, is a significant dip from the 41 that it put up during the 2016 regular season. However, that is almost double (15) their projected pace only two weeks ago.

With the edge rushers not creating as much pressure as they did when Williams and Anderson were leading the way, the Tide needs the young players such as Ray, Williams and Raekwon Davis, who leads the team in sacks with three, to continue to step up.

The biggest key to Alabama’s success getting after the quarterback could come down to JUCO transfer Isaiah Buggs, who has slowly become one of Alabama’s best defensive players.

The 6-5, 293-pound former 4-star only has a half-sack, but he was leading the defense is quarterback pressures heading into Saturday’s game, according to CFB Film Room.

The pieces are there for Alabama to continue the level of production that they’ve produced over the past couple of weeks, but it’s still premature to say that they’ve returned to the level that they had been playing at from the previous two years.

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