Seattle’s Super Bowl run doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Ryan Grubb at Alabama
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Somewhere, Alabama offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb watched the Seattle Seahawks’ run to the Super Bowl, and he probably had a few thoughts about his former team. Maybe one of them was “hey, where were all of these yards after first contact in the run game when I was the offensive coordinator here in 2024?” Perhaps Grubb said to himself, “Jaxon Smith-Njigba’s emergence has really opened things up in the run game.” Or, dare I say, Grubb allowed himself to go to the place that many a Seattle fan went to at some point during a 2025 season in which it earned a division title, a No. 1 seed and an NFC title.
“Man, Mike Macdonald was right to fire me after 1 season.”
One can’t assume that Grubb had any of those thoughts. After all, he didn’t get to the place he’s at by letting results outside of his control impact his confidence as a play caller. For all we know, Grubb’s only thoughts while watching Sam Darnold play the game of his life with his successor, soon-to-be-head-coach Klint Kubiak, were positive and not introspective.
But here’s another thought — what Seattle just did after being 1-and-done with Grubb doesn’t exactly bode well for Alabama’s offensive future.
I know, I know. NFL results and college results are different beasts. Now is the part where you tell me that Nick Saban couldn’t cut it in the NFL, and he’s the best college coach ever. A more applicable and recent case of those different beasts might be Chip Kelly, who was the offensive play caller for Ohio State’s national championship run in 2024, but then was 1-and-done (not even) with the Las Vegas Raiders a year later.
Sometimes, results are independent of one another and we shouldn’t connect dots. I get that.
What’s troubling, however, is that Seattle’s post-Grubb offensive success coincided with Alabama’s historic failure with him in Year 1
By “historic failure,” I’m obviously referring to the ground game. Like, the thing that Alabama struggled with more on a per-game basis than any team in program history, including the 0-10 team in 1955.
Getting to an SEC Championship and then pulling off a 17-point comeback at Oklahoma in the Playoff was great in Year 2 of the Kalen DeBoer era, but running for 104.1 yards/game was not. Duh. We’re not breaking news by saying that. And considering that 1999 Florida State had the worst rushing yards/game average (122.8) of any national championship winner since that stat became available in 1936, yeah, it’s fair to say the Tide’s Achilles’ heel proved costly in making a run to a title.
To be fair, scheming in the run game was never billed as one of Grubb’s strengths. In his 5 previous seasons as an FBS OC before reuniting with DeBoer in 2025, he didn’t have a single top-60 rushing attack in terms of yards/game.
When Washington’s national runner-up season put Grubb and DeBoer into the national spotlight, it was thanks in large part to a high-octane vertical offense that led the country in passing with a first-round quarterback and 3 NFL-bound receivers (it was 4 future NFL receivers if you include soon-to-be-drafted Germie Bernard). That season, the Washington rushing attack finished outside the top 100 in FBS in yards/game. It was Dillon Johnson or bust, which worked just fine when he was healthy, but then crumbled when he got banged up against Texas in the semifinals. His success after first contact (689 yards as a runner vs. 13 Power Conference foes) and forcing missed tackles (43 total) played a big role in his 1,189-yard season with Grubb at the controls.
Alabama didn’t have anyone with 600 total rushing yards in the 2025 season, which went 15 games. Even worse, Alabama’s entire backfield forced just 48 missed tackles (3.2/game) and of those 890 yards after first contact from that group, 28.7% of them came against mighty Louisiana-Monroe and FCS Eastern Illinois. In other words, Alabama’s running back room had just 635 yards after first contact in the 13 Power Conference games it played (48.8 average). Just for a little perspective, Tennessee had a middle-of-the-pack rushing attack in the SEC (No. 8 in the conference in yards/game), and its backfield averaged 91.7 yards after first contact per Power Conference game.
If you’re just blaming that discrepancy on the Jam Miller injury, you’ve got your blinders on. If you just pin Seattle’s 2024 ground game struggles on Kenneth Walker III being injured or the offensive line not playing well enough behind the wrong quarterback, ask yourself this. Don’t you think that if the latter were true, Macdonald would’ve shown his top assistant a little more grace after his first year on the job in which the Seahawks were 10-7? Or do you think that having a bottom-5 rushing attack in the NFL with slippery backs like Walker and Zach Charbonnet was considered a fireable offense and worthy of a schematic overhaul?
Even Grubb can’t deny how much of an upgrade his Seattle OC successor has been
By the way, Macdonald’s post-Year 1 firing of Grubb was followed by Seattle vaulting into the top 10 in the NFL in rushing yards/game in 2025. A renewed commitment to the ground game — the Seahawks tied for No. 3 in the NFL in rushing attempts in the regular season — has been noticeable. In a pair of all-or-nothing games in which Seattle’s offense was mostly without Charbonnet after tearing his ACL in the first half of the divisional round vs. San Francisco, Walker shined with a combined 256 scrimmage yards (he never eclipsed more than 225 scrimmage yards in a 2-game stretch under Grubb) and 4 rushing touchdowns.
For those who have wondered how Seattle reached the Super Bowl with a quarterback who led the NFL in turnovers, look at the elite defense and the versatile ground attack, which has shifted to a much more zone-run heavy offense under Kubiak than it was under Grubb. According to Pro Football Focus, Seattle’s zone-run attempts nearly doubled from 160 in 17 games under Grubb to 317 in 19 games under Kubiak.
Like Seattle in 2024, Alabama’s 2025 ground game with Grubb lacked an identity. It had nearly an even split of zone runs to gap runs (193-200), which might’ve looked good on paper, but it clearly didn’t fool any defenses. At least not enough to yield any sort of breakaway runs. Alabama’s lone run of at least 30 yards in 13 games vs. Power Conference competition came on a 30-yard run by Daniel Hill in the second half of the Round 1 Playoff game at Oklahoma.
Hill will be a focal point of a 2026 Alabama ground attack that stayed the same in some ways — keeping Grubb felt somewhat inevitable given how synonymous he’s been with DeBoer’s success — but changed in others. One of those changes included a delayed firing of offensive line coach Chris Kapilovic, who happened to be the offensive line coach and run-game coordinator at Michigan State when the aforementioned Walker won the Doak Walker Award (no relation) in his breakout season in 2021. Kapilovic’s successor in that role is reportedly Adrian Klemm, who in the 2020s alone worked under the likes of Lincoln Riley (USC offensive analyst), Bill Belichick (Patriots O-line coach), Dan Lanning (Oregon run-game coordinator/O-line coach) and Mike Tomlin (Steelers O-line coach).
Perhaps a new offensive line coach with recent experience at both levels will help fuel a ground-game turnaround in 2026. But considering that Alabama was the 4th consecutive place in which Grubb’s rushing attack wasn’t anything to write home about, one shouldn’t hold their breath a complete 180.
Well, at least not like the one we saw for Super Bowl-bound Seattle.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
