It's just Vanderbilt . A pushover. An easy win.
The Alabama football uniform alone will carry the day.
The Crimson Tide's play said all those things about the Commodores in Nashville a year ago, even if the players were smart enough not to say it themselves. It said Alabama felt entitled, that it wasn't ready to play, and that it expected Vandy to submit the way it had the previous 23 times the teams had met.
Final score: Vanderbilt 40, Alabama 35.
How could UA have come off an impressive 41-34 win over SEC powerhouse Georgia the previous week, then played so poorly against a lesser team seven days later? Complacency was the only plausible answer. An air of invincibility permeated the locker room after Crimson Tide had dispatched the nation's second-ranked team, and it hung there long enough to infect its mental approach to facing the Commodores .
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Fast-forward 12 months, and Alabama is in the same position: coming off a big win over the Bulldogs as it enters Vanderbilt week. Credit coach Kalen DeBoer, at least, for using the 2024 Georgia-Vanderbilt sequence as a reminder and a lesson to his players, rather than denying the obvious.
"I'm not going to argue against that. You've got to handle success and you've got to come back every single week in this league. Every coach I talk to at midfield, that's what the conversation's about is, 'Here we go again'. You've got to reload mentally, physically, emotionally too during the week get prepared at the highest level you possibly can and go play ball," DeBoer said. "Physically, it's going to be a battle and mentally, you've got to be ready to respond and so yeah, we didn't handle success last year well. You can't argue that."
If avenging last year's upset loss to Vanderbilt isn't motivation enough, Alabama can also simply look at the Commodores' season to date. Not only are they 5-0 for the first time since 2008, they've been blowing opponents out. Last week's 55-35 win over Utah State was Vanderbilt's closest margin of victory all season. VU has also won road games at Virginia Tech and South Carolina by 24 points each.
Quarterback Diego Pavia , who gave the Crimson Tide defense fits a year ago, is back again and more effective than ever. The option offense he directs is confounding for defensive fronts that don't read the play quickly enough, particularly when the point of attack moves to the perimeter. That's a tall order for an Alabama defense that just allowed Georgia 227 rushing yards. It's telling that with just one SEC game completed, Alabama's run defense ranks 90th in the nation at 160.5 yards per game, with much of the running room found outside the tackles.
This is a better Vanderbilt team than the one that knocked off Alabama 12 months ago. There's no reason to think it won't run the ball effectively even if Alabama takes the game more seriously.
But for the Crimson Tide, taking the Commodores more seriously must be the starting point.
Tuscaloosa News columnist Chase Goodbread is also the weekly co-host of Crimson Cover TV on WVUA-23. Reach him at cgoodbread@gannett.com. Follow on X.com @chasegoodbread.
This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Will Alabama football pass complacency test it failed vs Vandy in '24?
