Jumbo Package: Alabama’s Coaches Speak after tight game vs USC

Here are the weekly roundup of press conferences from yesterday:

Kalen DeBoer

On the shovel pass hurting Alabama’s defense the last couple of weeks and if it can expect to see until they prove they can stop it:

“No question. I mean, it’s going to get thrown at you in different ways. Personnel or the formations that people line up in, you’re going to try to find from an offensive standpoint, putting those shoes on and just trying to understand what that’s going to look like in their scheme. It’s going to be presented in a different way. 15 or 20 years ago, I was running that quite a bit myself because it’s a play that you have to defend. It might be presentation off of a boot, it might be presented off a sprint-out option. But you’ve got to identify where everyone’s at and everyone’s got to fit their gaps. Apply your rules is really the significance of it. People are going to use different things to try to really challenge your eye discipline as a defense. That’s one of the plays that obviously the last two weeks has been utilized to challenge us in that regard.”

Tennessee regularly runs the shovel pass as a normal part of their offense…. Which is terrifying for a team that is giving up about 30 yards per shovel. Love it.

Kane Wommack

What happened on the fourth down busted coverage?

“Often what happens in coverage is a domino effect of one player doesn’t do something, so another player gets ready to compensate for it. Then all of a sudden you may have taken away their first or second read. But ultimately, if you give the quarterback time, we’re going to have an issue. Doing our job, our 1/11th of the defense is critical. That’s something that we keep harping on to our players. Make sure you’re focused on your responsibility and your job within the framework of the defense. Trust that everyone else is going to do their job as well. So we had a breakdown in terms of playing over top of a route we should have been expanding on in that particular coverage. But there were other pieces that did not help in terms of being where they needed to be at the beginning of the play so that we can leverage things out properly in terms of our spacing and that coverage. Again, I think our pass rush has taken some really great steps. But also when you’re not getting pressure and you’re giving time for those long developing plays on third down, that makes it challenging as well. A little bit across the board. You’ve got to continue to operate with consistency. That’s all 11 guys doing their job where often in those moments something’s going to break down.”

I’m not out on Kane Wommack as a defensive coordinator. I am still a proponent on the core of his scheme, and I think there’s a lot of growing pains from a secondary that has totally turned over from a year ago and built fully on transfers and freshmen.

In this case, it was fully a result of players not trusting another player to do their job, and it almost lost the game for the Tide. The hope is that they learn and grow.

How Jalen Milroe has handled decision making under pressure:

“I think Jalen has responded great in those moments. I think there’s always going to be plays where you wish you could handle it differently, I think that’s the nature of the position. And so there were some learning opportunities that occurred in the game this past week and that occur every game, where choices you make, decisions make, that work out in your favor, and maybe it wasn’t the right decision, so you still learn from there. And then, obviously, when the result isn’t what you want, relative to the play, you learn, you grow, you improve. You have conversations and communication of why that happened. And there’s always a story to whatever poor decision or every mistake that you make, so we just talk through that, learn, grow, improve and try to get better throughout the week of prep. And try to just put them in, Jalen, but all the other players, in position to where things that you didn’t execute as well as you’d like, put them in that positon in practice so you can get better.”

While Milroe has some backsliding last week, his games against Georgia and Vanderbilt showed significant growth at identifying blitzes and pressures and making them pay with intermediate passing across the middle. I think that’s a big credit to Sheridan and DeBoer.