TUSCALOOSA, Ala. _ It’s been nearly eight months of hearing about nothing else. Every day someone’s brought up how the University of Alabama football team lost its last two games of the 2013 season, the dramatic defeat to its biggest rival after time expired and how its defensive weakness is apparently to no-huddle spread offenses.
The Crimson Tide knows better on that last one, but that doesn’t mean everyone isn’t tired of the constant reminders.
“You get sick of hearing everything,” senior safety Nick Perry said. “It’s that and some other stuff, but we just kind of want to prove that ’Bama’s back on top. We want to restate order and get back on top of the SEC.”
For the most part it was a quiet offseason in Tuscaloosa, with the rest of the college football world enjoying that for the first time since 2010 another program is the reigning champion. Nobody mentions that it was led by Nick Saban disciples or that Auburn beat Alabama on a special-teams play, but that’s fine. It has all only helped motivate the Crimson Tide throughout the spring and summer much like the 2010 team’s eventual failures inspired the 2011 run.
At least that what Saban’s hoped, because in terms of pure talent this is his most loaded roster to date.
“I like this team,” the coach repeatedly said during the past month when the Crimson Tide went through 29 practices as part of the buildup to Saturday’s season opener against West Virginia at the Georgia Dome (3:30 p.m. ET, ABC/ESPN2).
He’s liked the players’ approach. He’s liked the camaraderie. He’d like to see a couple more standout leaders, but considering the focus of the entire team, from top to bottom, that may not be necessary. More players are involved – for example Alabama is taking 13 defensive linemen to Atlanta, the most yet for the coach — and consequently they have more at stake.
All indications are that they have, to use Saban’s preferred term, “bought in.”
That doesn’t mean the Crimson Tide doesn’t have some major question marks. There’s no proven players at arguably the three spots a coach wants them the most: quarterback, cornerback and left tackle. More depth would be preferred at linebacker and Alabama will have both a new kicker and true freshman at punter.
Saban couldn’t do much about all that except get the players in those spots as ready as possible and prepare contingency plans. For the program as a whole, though, he called for a resurrection of its identity, and even went so far as to bring back members of his original coaching staff at Alabama in 2007 to help make it happen.
“I think he just means that we need to be one,” senior right tackle Austin Shepherd said. “We don’t need to be little pods of people in groups. When he talks about it to us, he just says that we need to be a group, get out there, play together, and then once you’re off the field you guys need to hang out because that means you guys are going to click better on the field.”
But as senior fullback Jalston Fowler put it, it also means to “Just get back to playing physical and tough.”
Alabama’s reputation is to grind away on offense and for the defense to get off the field as quickly as possible, something last year’s team had some trouble with when facing quarterbacks like Johnny Manziel, Nick Marshall and Trevor Knight.
The Crimson Tide was actually pretty good last season. After leading the nation in scoring defense during its back-to-back national titles in 2011 and 2012, it was fourth in 2013, allowing 13.9 points per contest.
It still managed to lead the SEC in total defense for the sixth straight season, whereas no program in league history had previously managed to do that for more than two consecutive seasons. Since 2009 Alabama has given up the fewest touchdowns in the nation with 91 over 67 games, 36 fewer than the second most (LSU with 127).
But that’s the difference between being pretty good and dominating. It means recapturing the hunger that took Alabama to the SEC Championship Game in 2008, and three titles over the subsequent four seasons. West Virginia will be the first of 12-plus barometers this fall.
“We’ve always been known as a defense that’s unstoppable,” junior safety Landon Collins said. “You can’t run the ball or throw the ball on us. That’s how we want to portray our defense like we did in previous years.”
Christopher Walsh has covered Alabama football since 2004 and is the author of 19 books. In his free time, he writes about college football.
