Well so far in this pre-season, I have reminisced about the past and warned of the future but it’s finally time to remain in the present and take a look around. This season I will be one of CFB’s beat writers for the 2014 Alabama Crimson Tide. Hey, it’s not a bad gig. I grew up watching Alabama, eventually went to Alabama and now I get to write about my favorite subject . . . Alabama. Truthfully, I have been writing about Alabama and the SEC for quite a few years. Now I just have to do it for a larger audience. The bad news is that now I have to check my facts and not rely on my ever growing foggy memory.
This will be a pivotal year for the Tide. Alabama has finally been knocked off of its perch and history shows that getting back up, once your down, is nearly impossible. In my last article, I wrote about Paul W. “Bear” Bryant. One of Bryant’s most impressive achievements was Bryant getting Alabama back to the top once the program had started to decline under his stewardship. Accomplishing that, while remaining at the same school, is almost unheard of. Even legendary coach Marty Schottenheimer once quipped that ten years was as much as any head coach should stay at a program.
Nick Saban came to Alabama in the 2007 season and enters his eighth year as the head man at Alabama. During that time, he has won two SEC championships and three national championships. Most would agree those are pretty good results for seven years. One of the reasons it is so hard for a great coach to have success at the same program past the ten year mark is because that coach’s success changes the game. Saban coming into the SEC was a direct response to Steve Spurrier’s success in the 1990s. Spurrier came in as someone who could get Florida past the strong defenses that were left over from the Bryant era. Now Saban has created an atmosphere in the SEC where athletic directors are searching for offensive gurus that can break through and those athletic directors are having success.
In any conference, the successes of offenses and defenses are cyclical. As one rises, the other falls and vice versa. The SEC that has been dominated by defense is finding it hard to keep up with the new offensive coaching regimes. Gus Malzahn of Auburn and Kevin Sumlin of Texas A&M are leading the way in providing offenses that are exposing SEC defenses. If Alabama has any hope of remaining on top, it’s going to require that Alabama adjusts. This isn’t just a matter of players feeling “entitled.” This is a problem that goes to coaching.
Nick Saban has already made major adjustments coming into the 2014 season. The biggest adjustment is bringing in Lane Kiffin as his new Offensive Coordinator. The jury is out on Lane Kiffin and it has been out. He hasn’t been around any place long enough to get a good gauge on his coaching abilities. He had a great load of success during his years at USC as an assistant but that is counter-balanced to his years of underachieving at USC while he was a head coach. Kiffin is surrounded with top tier talent. No team in the country has recruited better than Alabama. Alabama is making a change at the quarterback position and it is a significant change. Alabama is replacing its most successful quarterback in its storied history.
Even with the current crop of talent, Kiffin will have some additional talent at his reach. Alabama has brought on Florida State transfer Jake Coker. Coker was a highly touted recruit at Florida State. Still, Coker doesn’t have the job cemented. Returning backup Blake Sims is still in competition for the starting position.
Whoever gets the nod at quarterback will have a plethora of great receivers as targets. Amari Cooper and Christion Jones are veteran receivers that both excel under pressure and are prone to amazing feats of athleticism when needed. This will be balanced out with Alabama using Saban’s method of rotating two to three running backs. A lot of excitement surrounds Alabama running back Derrick Henry. Henry quickly draws comparisons to Trent Richardson, Alabama’s pounding running back from a few years ago. In short, this is an offense than can, should, and will score. If there are question marks about the 2014 Tide, it comes from Saban’s specialty, the defense.
Even though Alabama’s offense didn’t always excel last year, there was one clear reason why Alabama didn’t return for a third try for a national title. The defense, which remained strong for most of the season, was prone to collapses and mostly those collapses came at the hands of very strong, attacking offenses. Alabama’s secondary was shredded by Texas A&M last year. Alabama’s normal ability to stop the run proved anemic against Auburn in last year’s Iron Bowl and Oklahoma scored in a variety of ways against the Tide in the Sugar Bowl.
Nick Saban loves a challenge. His love of a challenge is so great that it was rumored that he almost left Tuscaloosa for Austin last year to become the head man of the Texas Longhorns. The truth is there is more than enough of a challenge for Nick Saban in Tuscaloosa. If Alabama were to make the four team playoff and win this year’s championship, from the outside, it wouldn’t look like much of a surprise but the reality would be that Saban would have staved off the young guns that are on his heels. To do that is something that even the greatest coaches of all time almost always fail to do. Even Bryant, who was able to finally adjust to the game of the late 1960s, took a few years to get Alabama back to the top. This will be one of the most pivotal years in Saban’s coaching career and indicative as to whether Alabama is still at the top or if the high water mark for Alabama happened in January 2013.
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