Happy Monday, everyone. As you well know by now, Alabama made the College Football Playoff as the 9th seed despite getting taken to the woodshed by Georgia on Saturday. Kalen DeBoer continues to talk about injuries, and believes that the team will look more like the one we saw in Athens than the one we saw on Saturday.
“If I went through, and I don’t think this is what this is about, if I went through the guys who we are gluing together, I know that locker room has the same situation going on,” DeBoer
said. “You talk about Parker Brailsford, if you give these guys two weeks to get ready and what the health will look like for these guys, Parker Brailsford, (Germie Bernard), Daniel Hill. I’m not going to say what he’s playing through, but two weeks, it will be a different Daniel Hill. You execute, or you have a lack of execution in games because you probably didn’t have everyone out there working together in practice.”
Color me skeptical as this team hasn’t looked very good for a while now, but hope he’s right. Here is his latest update on the injured players.
“Jam, I feel, is probably the farthest along, if I really kind of put that kind of in order,” DeBoer said. “I feel really that he’s got a really strong chance of being not just available, but ready to go at a level he can compete in and do some good things for us.
“And Josh will be — he’s on his way. We’ve kind of just got to keep evaluating with him. I’m holding on to some pretty good hope, but we’ll see. He hasn’t seen our training staff yet today, but every day here now, the next four or five days, they all matter. They all matter for all these guys.
“And then we’ll continue to evaluate just where LT’s at. And add Kelby Collins to the mix there, too, with some of their illnesses and stuff like that, that they’re going through. So I’m optimistic on a lot of these guys.”
The Overton thing is weird. He was on the sideline and looked fine on Saturday.
Kalen also shared his message to Ty Simpson.
“Keep your head up,” DeBoer remembers telling Simpson. “We got this.”
DeBoer didn’t think Simpson needed any more than that.
“A couple small things can lead to big things,” DeBoer said in a teleconference after Alabama secured its College Football Playoff berth against Oklahoma. “And we don’t need to make it bigger than it is. And we’ve just got to keep chipping away.”
Simpson gets another game, one in which to respond after completing 19 of 39 pass attempts for 212 yards, a touchdown and an interception.
Simpson had a much better day against Oklahoma than the past two games. Still, his splits are staggering. He opened the season with a bad 118 passer rating vs FSU, then put up an elite 183 for six games. In the last six he’s at 120, including a combined 104 the past two weekends.
If Ty can play the same game he did vs Oklahoma last time without the 87-yard pick six, Alabama will have a great chance to win the ballgame.
Of course, they’d have had a great chance to beat Georgia had he played as well as he did in Athens.
Brent Venables notes the familiarity of these opponents at this stage.
“The challenge of playing someone you didn’t play is getting to know who they are and you really don’t have a great idea of how you match up in certain areas,” Venables said. “This is one where there is familiarity with both teams. The third time we’re playing in just over a year.
“Obviously, we have tendencies. They have tendencies. They have certain matchup they like. We have certain matchups we like. At the end of the day, you can throw all that out. It’s time to start completely over. All that matters is what you do here moving forward.”
Last, Notre Dame was so mad about missing the playoff that they boycotted their bowl game.
“There is no explanation that could possibly be given to explain the outcome,” Bevacqua said. “As I said to [head coach Marcus Freeman], one thing is for sure: Any rankings or show prior to this last one is an absolute joke and a waste of time. Why put these young student-athletes through these false emotions just to pull the rug out from underneath them having not played a game in two weeks and then a group of people in a room shatter their dreams without explanation?
“We feel like the playoff was stolen from our student-athletes.”
Notre Dame became the third team to decline a bowl bid on Sunday afternoon. Both Kansas State and Iowa State previously said they weren’t going to bowl games after coaching changes. KSU coach Chris Klieman retired and ISU coach Matt Campbell has been hired at Penn State. The Big 12 fined each school $500,000 for not going to a bowl game.
Seems like someone who is very respected in the college football world once warned us that a playoff would kill the bowls. The Birmingham Bowl had a difficult time finding anyone to play Georgia Southern, finally getting a commitment from 5-7 Appalachian State.
That’s about it for today. Have a great week.
Roll Tide.
