Tide looks to fix week-to-week inconsistency

You watched the game. You saw the stats.

To say that Alabama beat Clemson is akin to calling Nick Saban “a little rough around the edges.”

After 60 minutes, Clemson’s highly praised backfield had zero to show for. Literally.
C.J. Spiller, James Davis and co., hemmed up behind their backpedaling offensive line, combined for zero rushing yards, the worst ground production out of Clemson since the signing of the Truman Doctrine (that would be 1947). Even if the statisticians scored it NFL-style, adding negative yards from sacks to the passing game rather than the rushing game, Spiller and Davis still only netted 22 yards.

Thanks to Alabama’s domination of the lines of scrimmage, Clemson had the ball for just 18 minutes and some change and converted just a single third down.

All the proverbials applied: Lights, knocked out. Clocks, cleaned. Woodshed, visited.
The Crimson Tide beat them so bad, Clemson coach Tommy Bowden called pops, Mark Richt and even Saban trying to figure out how it all went so catastrophically wrong.

In a primetime, pressure-filled setting, the Tide made the Tigers look like FCS underlings.
Fast forward.

Alabama is back at home in the friendly confines of Bryant-Denny Stadium. No national audience, no split crowd (in fact, with Hurricane Gustav’s recent landfall, the visitor’s section was as small as it’s been in years.)

Out of the tunnel storms not a No. 9 team from a power-six conference, but a Matt Forte-less Tulane team that went 4-8 last season with losses to Army and UAB.

After 60 minutes, Alabama’s special teams had outscored its offense. A week after dismantling Clemson, the Tide made Tulane seem like an SEC foe. At the least, it took just as much grit to knock them off.

In classic, grind-it-out SEC fashion, Alabama escaped with a 20-6 win. Less emphasis on the “win,” more on the “escaped.”

“Whether we were great against Clemson, now we were horrible against Tulane,”

quarterback John Parker Wilson said. “Now we got to get back. You say it’s playing down to your opponents, not getting up for a game. We didn’t do what we were supposed to. We didn’t play our football … We can’t go up and down like that.”

The offense’s lapse was surprising, but at the same time, not at all.

It was surprising because a seasoned Tide offense, the most experienced unit, hung 30 points a top-tier ACC team just a week ago. Applying the dangerously inconsistent transitive property of football: 30 points against No. 9 = massacre against unranked team.

But contrary to their momentum and the math, the offense mustered just six points.

“We’re lucky the defense showed up to win that game,” Wilson said. “Because if they didn’t, and Javy taking that kick back, we wouldn’t have won the game. The offense didn’t play winning football.”

In an odd contradiction, perhaps Alabama fans should have seen this coming.
Just last year, after bull rushing Tennessee 41-17 and losing a 41-34 shootout to LSU, Alabama suffered three straight losses, scoring 12, 14 and 10 points respectively.

Saban tried to keep his team on an even keel, appealing to the never-get-too-high-or-too-low angle. Even though the Tide didn’t complete the descent a la Louisiana-Monroe, the victory wasn’t near good enough for the perfectionist head coach.

“Obviously [the win against Clemson] had an effect on our team,” Saban said. “We’ll learn from it. You can tell your kids sometimes that they shouldn’t do certain things, like touch the stove, but sometimes they have to figure it out for themselves.

“It’s great to win, but it’s not always great to win when you feel like you
don’t play to your capabilities, and I certainly didn’t think we did that.”

Alabama squeezed by Houston last year in homecoming. The Tide have struggled against Sun Belt teams in back to back years, losing to one of them.

It raises the question: In the modern college football world, is there still such thing as a pushover? Can teams afford to guess?

Last year, “2007: the year of the upset,” saw FCS Appalachian State knock off Michigan in The Big House. At one time, South Florida was ranked No. 2.

Already in 2008, Bowling Green upended then-No. 25 Pittsburgh; Michigan lost another season-opener in the Big House, this time to Utah of the Mountain West Conference; Ohio led No. 3 Ohio State going into the fourth quarter at the Shoe, and the Buckeyes needed a 14-point rally to fend of their lost to another Ohio school since 1921; And Eastern Carolina pulled a double feature against Va. Tech and West Virginia.

“Football has changed,” linebacker Corey Reamer said. “You don’t have many cakewalks anymore, as you can see in the first two weeks of the season. Not that there are cakewalks in that conference, but usually those guys are your early games that you like to get your feet wet with. You have to be prepared … There are no easy ones anymore.”

Lesser-known teams are going after big-time recruits, and they’re starting to land more and more of them.

“You have to respect each team equally,” safety Rashad Johnson said. “[Tulane] definitely have guys on their team that can make plays that probably could play on an SEC team. There are definitely guys that get looked over at times. You have to play hard every week, because you never know.”

Schools like Florida International and Florida Atlantic offered Javier Arenas before Alabama swooped him up. But Arenas knows he could have fallen under the SEC radar, and he knows some of the elite talent does.

“If a team slipped on me, they were going to pay,” Arenas said. “That’s why I can see from their perspective, how they feel when they come to a game like this. So I don’t want to give them a chance to breathe. I try to spread that to my teammates … If we say it, and we practice it and we go out there and we focus as if we’re about to play against a national championship competitor, then things like that won’t happen.”

Western Kentucky, an independent team in the middle of a transition from FCS to FBS, is a solid candidate for looking-ahead-to-Arkansas syndrome. But after the hangover against Tulane, players said their focus wouldn’t slip leading up to Saturday’s meeting with the Hilltoppers.

“You can’t take a bye week or anybody can beat you,” Wilson said.