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The Tuscaloosa News
Why August is much too soon for an Alabama football look in the mirror | Goodbread
- Story byThe Tuscaloosa News
- Why August is much too soon for an Alabama football look in the mirror | Goodbread
TALLAHASSEE, Fla. − In the wake of Alabama football's uninspiring 31-17 loss at Florida State Saturday, team captain and quarterback Ty Simpson mentioned something about how common it is for national champions in college football to lose a game.
It was an attempt to point out that an 0-1 start doesn't sink the Crimson Tide's goal of a championship, but however accurate that might be, nothing about Alabama 's performance gave the impression that a championship is anything more than a pipedream.
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Not its offense, which struggled after a promising touchdown drive to open the game.
Not it's defense, which yielded a staggering 230 rushing yards.
And perhaps not even the strength of its opponent. FSU looked good, to be sure, but it remains to be seen whether the Seminoles are contenders themselves. It was the kind of remark one might expect to hear in late October, or even November, in the losing locker room of a playoff-bound team trying to shore up a single, correctable deficiency. A team with a stout body of work already to its credit. A team within an arm's reach of a prize.
Alabama is none of those things, because it just dropped Game One.
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The defensive effort was especially disappointing. Hiccups from Simpson's first career start could be expected and understood. But Alabama's defense is far too experienced to be exposed like it was, particularly by the collection of transfers that made up the Seminoles' offense. The pass rush was non-existent, the run defense porous and a pair of personal fouls didn't speak well of the defense's discipline, either.
A long season awaits, and snap judgments often prove too harsh. But season-opening losses are also the worst kind, because there's nothing behind them to suggest the calamity is an aberration. For a program like Alabama, having to regroup this early in the season is like a fancy restaurant failing its first health inspection. When the Rolling Stones start a tour, there's not supposed to be a snag with the first sound check.
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But that's where Alabama finds itself before the calendar has even turned to September: staring at the gut-check mirror so early it had to unbox it first and remove the bubble wrap. The Crimson Tide entered play having won 22 consecutive season openers dating back to a 20-17 home loss to UCLA in 2001. That's a long stretch that had to end at some point, but for second-year UA coach Kalen DeBoer, it comes with the worst of timing.
DeBoer himself has rightly described his debut season of 2024 as a disappointment because it didn't result in a berth in the College Football Playoff, and now his second UA team has dug itself the earliest possible hole in trying to achieve that in Year Two. In the modern era, only three teams have lost a season opener, then gone on to win a national title: 1957 Ohio State, 1974 Southern Cal and 1983 Miami.
Legendary Alabama coach Nick Saban once said that upon arriving at UA in 2007, he heard a lot from players about championship goals, but none of them knew what it took to get there, so he implored them to replace that aspiration with a goal of daily improvement. Without that, the coach said, a championship isn't possible anyway.
Does this team know what it takes? While there are some players who were part of Alabama's 2023 SEC championship team, none remain from the Crimson Tide's last national title-winning team of 2020. Simpson wasn't alone in trying to point out that a season can't be lost in Week 1. Another captain, linebacker Deontae Lawson , said the Crimson Tide has "no more margin for error."
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But a team can't lose a margin for error if it hasn't built one in the first place.
Tuscaloosa News sport columnist Chase Goodbread.
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: Why August is much too soon for an Alabama football look in the mirror
