Tag Archives: Alabama Crimson Tide

Games

Nick Saban of Alabama Crimson Tide admits defense is no longer the key to victory | Instant News


KNOXVILLE, Tenn. – Alabama Coach Nick Saban finally relented, albeit reluctantly. He said college football was officially an offensive game.

“In the past, a good defense beats a good attack. Good defense doesn’t beat a good attack anymore,” Saban told ESPN on Friday. “It’s like last week. Georgia have a good defense like we did the offense, and we scored 41 points for them [in a 41-24 Alabama win]. It wasn’t like that before. It used to be that if you had good defense, other people wouldn’t score. You will always be in the game.

“I told you. It’s not like that anymore.”

And what does Saban, one of the game’s foremost defensive thinkers and architect of some of the more dominant defenses in college football, say?

“I don’t like it,” he said with a wry smile. “But we just have to make sure we have that kind of foul and that explosion, which we have.”

Crimson Tide, rank 2, facing up Tennessee on Saturday at Neyland Stadium, have scored 35 points or more in each of their last 17 games since the start of the 2019 season. They have scored more than 40 points in 13 of those 17 games. Saban noted that the team that won last week in the SEC averaged 33.2 points.

“It’s difficult to train defense now, because there are so many run-pass concepts that everyone does,” said Saban. “I mean, it’s really, really hard to train in the second tier … because you get so many mismatches there.”

While Alabama ranks second nationally in attacking scoring (48.5 points per game) and fifth in total defense (561.3 yards per game), the Tide is 37th in goalscorer defense (28.8 points). per match) and tied for 61st in total defense (458.3 yards per match). game).

“We are not very good in defense, averaging at best, but I think we will get better,” said Saban, adding that to be an elite in defense requires very well in the secondary.

“We’ll go there, but this group [in the secondary] don’t have enough experience. You have to go through the pain of growing up with these guys because they see so many things now in college football. We see something different every week. “

Saban says part of the difficulty in developing elite defensive backs and preparing them early in their careers is that most of the best athletes and attacking skill players are now in middle school and very few play in defense. In fact, Saban said that he worked as a senior recipient DeVonta Smith at the cornerback at pre-season camp to prepare him for emergencies.

“None of these guys’ skills have grown up playing defensively, from junior high, high school or anything,” said Saban. “So all the best athletes end up attacking. One of the best corners in our team is [Smith]. This year at camp, I trained him in the corner. He could protect anyone, and he never played last his whole life because he was on the offensive side. You don’t think Jaylen Waddle would be a good defender? “

Saban, who turns 69 this month, said the fear last week when he initially tested positive for COVID-19 only reinforced how much he enjoyed coaching and being on the pitch with the players.

But anyone who thought he might feel retired when he was isolated at home for those three days might want to think again.

“I do everything I want if I am in the office every day,” said Saban. “I was in meetings with the players at Zoom, zooming in on special team meetings like when I was sitting in my regular chair. I was in defensive meetings, defensive meetings and talking on the phone with the coaches during training. And when practice is over, we will watch. records about defense, offense and special teams. “

Saban joked that his wife, Terry, asked, “Is this what you do every day for 14 hours?”

Later that night, he asked Saban if he wanted to walk to the lake.

“I said, ‘No, I have a meeting in 15 minutes,'” Saban said.

Saban said, the hardest part was waiting for the test results before Georgia game. He needed three consecutive negative PCR tests, as per SEC guidelines, to deem the first test a false positive, which Saban said Friday was an antigen rapid test.

“I just prayed that I could get there,” said Saban. “I would feel bad if the team didn’t play well or if we lost because I wasn’t around, it doesn’t mean we will lose because I wasn’t there, but I would feel that way. The players and coach did a great job not letting go. it affected them for a week. “

Saban has warned the players that this season will be filled with distractions and be prepared for them. But he never imagined he would be one of those distractions.

“I told them, ‘This will be the norm, that every week something will happen. Someone will test positive,” Saban said. So when we had a team meeting on Wednesday after I initially tested positive, I said, ‘You know there must be something definite for me not to be there.’ But I said, ‘This is one of those distractions I’m talking about, and just because it’s me, we’re still going to manage it.’

“Everyone in the building is doing a great job.”

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Games

The SEC will play 10 games, the conference football schedule only in 2020 | Instant News


The SEC president and chancellor on Thursday approved the schedule for a 10-match soccer match, only the conference for the fall which began September 26.

The full schedule will be announced at a later date. The revised schedule, which was changed due to the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, increased two sheets of the usual SEC conference conference consisting of eight league matches, which included six division enemies, one permanent cross-division enemy and one rotating cross-division enemy.

Florida’s athletic director Scott Stricklin confirmed the SEC would maintain the division schedule and the eight teams currently scheduled, and that the league still determined two additional teams. The source told ESPN that one proposal that was widely discussed was to add cross-division rotors to each school for the 2021 and 2022 seasons. For example, Alabama would add Florida and Vanderbilt, and Georgia would add Arkansas and the State of Mississippi. Another proposal under consideration, said the source, would be for the league to design a ranking system based on schedule strength and add two additional league matches based on that system. Every plan must be approved by the athletic director.

The SEC title game is scheduled for December 19, two weeks later than planned, at the Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta. The schedule includes one open date for each school in the middle of the season, as well as an open date on December 12 for all teams.

The SEC made changes to allow “maximum flexibility in making the necessary scheduling adjustments while reacting to developments around the pandemic and continuing advice from medical experts,” the conference announcement said.

“The new plan for this soccer schedule is consistent with our university education goals to allow for a safe and orderly return to their student population campuses and to provide a healthy learning environment during the unique circumstances presented by the COVID-19 virus,” Commissioner Greg Sankey said in a statement. “This new schedule supports the security measures taken by each of our institutions to ensure the health of our campus community.”

The SEC is the fourth Power 5 conference this month to change its schedule to provide more flexibility during the pandemic, joining Big Ten, Pac-12 and ACC. The Big Ten and Pac-12 had previously said they would also play only the conference schedule. Pac-12 is expected to announce details of its plans on Friday.

ACC announced on Wednesday that it would use an 11-game schedule, which included independent FBS Notre Dame, playing a full league schedule consisting of 10 conference games and one non-conference match – a model influenced by the SEC’s decision, which canceled regular season competition matches. traditionally between ACC and SEC: Georgia-Georgia Tech, Florida-Florida State, Kentucky-Louisville and South Carolina-Clemson.

Sankey said it was “deeply regretted” that traditional competition will not occur in 2020, “but this is a unique thing, and hopefully a temporary situation that requires unconventional measures.”

ACC decided on the plus-one model as a way to accommodate four ACC / SEC competition matches. Syracuse athletics director John Wildhack, who made a video conference call before the SEC announced his decision, said it was important for the league to support the competition matches.

“If you can do things as a collective body and group that can benefit schools where it is important, I tend to try to be a good partner and support it,” he said. Asked whether the SEC was choosing the conference schedule to change the format of the ACC, Wildhack said, “In my opinion, no.”

Stricklin said the SEC’s discussion centered on the conference-only season before the ACC made an announcement on Wednesday. He also said he and other schools with rival ACC lobbied hard to keep one non-conference match on schedule, but because the league agreed to play 10 matches and push the starting date to September 26, there were not enough Saturdays to keep the non-game conference on schedule.

“If there was a way we could overcome it, but we would respect the decision we made as a league,” Stricklin said.

The reason officials decided to push for September 26 was based on information from medical experts who advised them “August to Labor Day has the opportunity to be rude in our region from a caseload perspective, especially reuniting schools and colleges. Trying to start the football season with that as a background without the benefit of watching the NFL start becoming a problem. “

Texas A&M athletics director Ross Bjork said the SEC’s discussion around competitive games “was a difficult part because the game was very meaningful for all four SEC programs.”

“They clearly have to stand up for it, and believe in it,” he said, “and it only comes down to the short window of the season, and how you can enter as many matches as possible, knowing that you need to start later, and that only comes to a calendar issue where we basically play 10 games over a 12-week period, and there’s no room to give everyone the best chance to play as many games as possible. “Those programs, they stand on the ground and it’s a great conversation. That’s just not suitable. “

The SEC decision also resulted in the cancellation of several other nonconference arranged marriages, including LSU-Texas and Tennessee-Oklahoma.

Alabama coach Nick Saban said in a statement that the conference option alone was the “best option” to keep players and staff safe while maintaining “integrity this season.”

“The safety of our team will be our top priority throughout the season, but we are also happy that our players will have the opportunity to compete and play this season,” Saban said. “I want to thank the leaders of our administration, our medical staff, the SEC and all the medical experts who guided us through this process.”

The SEC confirmed in its release that every student-athlete in all sports who chose not to participate this season due to health or safety issues related to COVID-19 will continue to get their scholarships respected and remain in good standing with their team.

Big 12 is the only Power 5 conference that has yet to determine its fall schedule, but its president will meet on Monday and will consider four or five models, according to commissioner Bob Bowlsby.

On Monday, Louisiana-Monroe athletic director Scott McDonald told ESPN that all 10 schools in the Sun Belt had entered the week in hopes of playing a full 12 game schedule, but that it was “certainly watching” the SEC.

With the SEC’s decision to go to the conference schedule alone, Louisiana-Monroe lost matches against Arkansas and Georgia – a total loss of $ 3.2 million in guaranteed income from an operating budget of $ 15.5 million.

“This can indeed be restored, but it is important,” McDonald said. “This is important. Like in your house if you experience about a 20% reduction in income, you have to make some decisions. Is this important? Yes, but we will definitely continue if we have to make that adjustment.”

Mark Schlabach, Chris Low, and Andrea Adelson from ESPN contributed to this report.

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Alabama Taulia Tagovailoa, Old brother, entered the transfer portal | Instant News


Taulia Tagovailoa might not follow in the footsteps of his brother who set a record.

The second student quarterback is the third string behind his brother, picking the first round of the Old, in Alabama last season before entering the transfer portal on Friday, a source told ESPN.

Taulia, a former four-star candidate, appeared in five matches, completing nine of 12 passes for 100 yards. When Tua is absent because of an injury, he is more experienced Mac Jones who takes over as a starter.

Jones, a redshirt student, started the last three matches of the season, including a 35-16 victory over Michigan at the Vrbo Citrus Bowl, where he made three touchdowns and no interception.

Jones will be a favorite to replace Tua, who is a former Heisman Trophy runner-up and led Alabama to the national championship as a freshman before being selected by the Miami Dolphins in the first round of the NFL draft last month.

Alabama also added prospective new students and five-star Bryce Young to the list as initial registrants. The California native was chosen as the 2019 Maxwell Football Club National The best offensive player of the year.

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Games

College football game in the spring? They have happened before | Instant News


Even though we were trained from birth to believe otherwise, college football does not need to happen in the fall. This is good news, because we now know there are different possibilities that the 2020 college football season will finish well until 2021. It might not even begin until then.

If a coronavirus pandemic demands that much, some of the biggest competition in the game will return to its roots. From the Iron Bowl to Michigan-Notre Dame, from Auburn-Georgia to the Big Game, their origins lie in winter and spring. Other leading schools, such as USC, Ohio State, Nebraska and Texas, also play 19th-century games in the first half of the calendar as well.

The earliest known campus game to be played at the beginning of the year took place in May 1874. College football developed along two lines of rules. Most schools prefer soccer games. Harvard, however, plays a game more similar to rugby. It took several years for Harvard to find another school that would agree to play according to the rules. In the winter of 1874, the rugby team at McGill University in Montreal offered to go down to Harvard to play one rugby match and one soccer match.

Harvard defeated McGill in football, 3-0, on Thursday, May 14. They played a goalless draw in rugby the following day.

Playing games to teach sports is the norm, most famous in small Catholic schools in northern Indiana. In November 1887, students at Notre Dame invited a team from Michigan, where they had played for almost a decade, to come west to give instructions to Ireland about how football worked, and then to play the game too. Michigan’s visit, including the 8-0 victory, went so well that soon the schools agreed to play again.

Michigan returned to South Bend at the first opportunity. Unfortunately, it won’t be for six months (April 1888), after one of the harshest winters in memory, according to “Natural Enemies,” the history of John Kryk’s competition. Michigan won both matches, 26-6 and 10-4, although as Kryk pointed out, both sides grumbled. Michigan didn’t allow a single point in the previous eight games, which began in 1884, so Michigan fans didn’t like that South Bend rookies on the boards in both matches. Notre Dame players and fans believe that Michigan scored in the second match by starting the game before Notre Dame was ready.

Yes, leading a dispute is almost as old as the game itself too.

The reason that other competition starts will resonate with anyone who is familiar with what drives modern football. The desire to defeat your neighbors long before Walter Camp registered at Yale. From the early days of campus soccer, schools scrambled for competitive advantage.

Take what we now know as the Big Game. In the fall of 1891, California, which has been playing football since 1883 – usually in the spring – challenged the new university across the San Francisco Bay in Palo Alto for a match. Stanford played the clock, pausing for three months while the team trained under the supervision of student organization president John Whittemore, who played at the University of Washington at St. Louis. The team agreed to play on March 19, 1892, when the Cardinal surprised the more experienced Bears with three first-half touchdowns (four points at the time), then held on to win 14-10.

There is also scheduling to attract crowds. Auburn and Georgia play their first match on Saturday, February 20, 1892, as part of a three-day weekend celebration around a new national holiday. Congress has made George Washington’s birthday – February 22 – a national holiday just seven years earlier.

Professor Auburn, George Petrie and Georgian professor Charles Herty, have discovered football while working on their doctorate at Johns Hopkins. When they returned to their respective campuses in 1891, they brought football. Petrie contacted Herty about the game between the two schools. They decided to play at Piedmont Park in Atlanta on Saturday, February 20, 1892, as part of Washington’s birthday celebration the following Monday.

“That’s headlines, not just sports,” in the Atlanta newspaper, former Bulldog coach and athletics director Vince Dooley said in the documentary.Saturday in the South“Georgia brought her mascot, a goat named Sir William, who was on the sidelines for the team’s first match three weeks earlier, a 50-0 victory over Mercer. Sir William, the Atlanta Journal reported, wearing a black coat decorated with” UG “in red. Georgia lost to Auburn, 10-0, and loyal followers of Sir William rebelled. “Alumni and fans are very disappointed,” said Dooley, “that they are roasting goats.”

Dooley stopped.

“That was the first tailgate in Georgia,” he said.

A year after Auburn played Georgia, the school became known as the Agriculture and Mechanics College of Alabama playing the University of Alabama on Washington’s actual birthday, Wednesday, February 22. On the same day, Wyoming played its first game, defeating Cheyenne High 14-0. The competition that came to be known as the Iron Bowl, one of which was once referred to by Beano Cook as “Middle Eastern campus soccer,” lasted longer than Wyoming-Cheyenne High . That one began to diminish in 1914.

Attaching a game to a vacation has several reasons or reasons. Many other winter or spring games don’t. USC, for example, played four games in January or February from 1888 to 1893.

“Games were played in those years almost on an ad hoc basis,” USC football historian Michael Glenn said in an email. “There is no concept of season.” In those early days, Glenn said, “USC plays soccer only when there is enough interest to bring down the team.”

North Carolina, Wake Forest and Duke (then known as Trinity) played a round-robin in March 1889. This is one of the earliest examples of creating instant competition: Wake won both matches with the coach, W.C. Riddick, who has graduated from Chapel Hill.

Texas fielded their first team in the fall of 1893 and enjoyed team games from Dallas and San Antonio so much that they scheduled a rematch in February the following year. Texas won all four, won the last two by a margin greater than the first two. No wonder Longhorns fans set the bar so high.

It will not be long before college football becomes as identified with the fall as a fall of the leaf. More than a century later, we are waiting to see whether the 2020 regular season will be remembered because of the fall of snow, or, heaven is helping us, pollen. Wherever the season lands on the calendar, there is some comfort in knowing college football has been around before.

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Games

The 25 most important matches in the revolution of the spread of college football | Instant News


LSU’s adoption of, and success with, the principles of violations spread in the 2019 college football season signaled the end spread the revolutionary life cycle of violations. To commemorate this moment, let’s look back to the 25 most important and definitive games of the deployment revolution.

19 December 1980: BYU 46, 45 high school

In 1980, Hal Mumme was a quarterback coach at West Texas A&M, asking existential questions about how passing games could be used and why people didn’t use it more. According to S.C. Gwynne’s “The Perfect Pass,” watching BYU team LaVell Edwards score three touchdowns in four minutes to defeat the old and strong high school team at school – at one of the biggest sports games, no less – while getting 446 yards in the air defeat 2 meters on the ground, is all the proof of concept needed by Mumme.

Much of the college football world continues to see BYU pass-happy violations as attracting attention in several ways, even when the Cougars won the 1984 national title and defeated almost all blue blood sports, from Miami to Penn State to Oklahoma to Notre Dame, for about 15 years. Mumme will then act as UTEP’s offensive coordinator and as a secondary school trainer before finally getting a job as the head of college coaching and to actually carry out his vision.

September 23, 1989: Iowa Wesleyan 49, Grinnell 7

Mumme’s first win as Iowa Wesleyan’s head coach was a mission statement. Grinnell committed a traditional offense and had defeated Wesleyan the previous year, but when Gwynne wrote in “Perfect Pass,” Wesleyan “destroyed them, 49-7, completing 30 of 50 attempted attempts for 408 yards and six touchdowns. Perspective, in the same year the team The NFL averages 18 passes per match from 32 attempts for 211 yards. “Seeds have been officially planted.

11 December 1993: East Central 49, Glenville State 35

Rich Rodriguez became head coach at Glenville State in West Virginia at the age of 26, and with a few people in the stands and a little pressure, he followed his nose, and some sound logic, for some new ideas. He chose a fast tempo for his offense because he hated to maintain two-minute training as a defense in West Virginia. He put his quarterback on the rifle because, as he told me in a 2014 interview, “We have shorter quarterbacks, and I think I can get five fat linings that can be hit slowly,” because that gives QB more time and space to throw. He found the reading zone when his quarterback snapped a snap on the inner zone handoff and slipped the ball and ran for a good gain instead.

In 1993, the Pioneers drove these concepts to the NAIA championship competition. Unfortunately, a violation that was clearly an Old School error – Tyler Jack’s fullback ran as far as 318 yards in the title game – won that day, and the defense coordinated by a young coach named Todd Graham made quite a stop. Two decades later, Rodriguez and Graham will train each other again, as rivals in Arizona and Arizona State.

October 4, 1997: Kentucky 40, Alabama 34

After three years in Iowa Wesleyan and five in the State of Valdosta, Mumme was hired by Kentucky in 1997. (C.M. Newton, British athletics director at the time, had a place in the hall of fame which was spread for this). massive dice roll.)

It took Mumme only about a month to make a big impression. In front of what would later become the second largest crowd in the history of the Commonwealth Stadium in England, Anwar Stewart returned a field goal that was blocked 68 meters at the end of the regulation, Team Couch connected with Craig Yeast to score 26 yards in the first extra time (he threw for 355 yards at that day), and the Wildcats defeated Crimson Tide for the first time since 1922.

Yes, 1922.

As Montgomery Advertiser John Zenor revealed the following morning, “Times change. Sometimes they change gradually, sometimes with the full force of Mack’s oncoming truck.” Mumme cannot build much momentum in the Lexington program, but others will soon succeed in spreading the gospel.

October 10, 1998: Wisconsin 31, Purdue 24

Thanks in part to 127 yards from sensation of sophomore Ron Dayne, Wisconsin defeated Purdue’s squad to move to 6-0 in the eventual Rose Bowl campaign. But all anyone can talk about is a second year student: Drew Brees, Purdue quarterback and point guard for Joe Tiller’s “basketball on grass” system. Boilermakers will continue to be angry maybe the best Kansas State team that has ever existed in the classic Alamo Bowl. But this game is on the list because Brees throws the NCAA record 83 passes, completing 55 (also a record) for 494 yards. (He also throws four interceptions, which change the game, but that’s not important.)

Two years later, the careless Boilermakers will go to the Rose Bowl for the first time in more than three decades.

31 December 1998: Tulane 41, BYU 27

New Tulane coach Tommy Bowden promoted Rodriguez from the rank of small school, and in his first season as an offensive coordinator in New Orleans, he increased his average Tulane score by 15 points per match and turned the team 2-9 to 7-4. In 1998, Green Wave jumped to 12-0 and 45 points per game.

Their Liberty Bowl victory is symbolic, coming as well as against BYU Edwards. “BYU has never played a team like us in offense,” Tulane quarterback Shaun King said after throwing for 276 yards and rushing for 109. The game also took place without Bowden, who had accepted Clemson’s work. Rodriguez joined him, and in two years Clemson Woody Dantzler had become the first quarterback to cross 2,000 yards and run 1,000 for the same season.

October 7, 2000: Oklahoma 63, Texas 14

After experiencing how frustrating the Mumme Air Strike system was to be defended, former Florida defensive coordinator Bob Stoops hired Mumme’s offensive coordinator, Mike Leach, as his own OC when he took the Oklahoma job in 1999. OU soon surged from 115th place to sixth in the scored a foul, and Leach became Texas Tech’s head coach after just one season at Norman.

The violations he left behind, now coordinated by Mark Mangino (and a little more balanced), continue to roll. In the Red River Competition in Dallas, Josh Heupel threw 275 meters, ran back Quentin Griffin scored six goals and OU rose 35-0 in just 3 minutes, 30 seconds into the second quarter. The Sooners beat No. 2 Kansas State in Manhattan the following week, then returned home and defeated Nebraska No. 1 on 17. Two months later, they defeated the State of Florida at the Orange Bowl to win a national title only two years after reaching 5 -6.

November 4, 2000: Northwestern 54, Michigan 51

After campaign 3-8, Northwestern coach Randy Walker and offensive coordinator Kevin Wilson knew their formation I attack would not have the body to compete in the Big Ten. They need tactical excellence. Wilson visited Rodriguez in Clemson in the spring of 2000, learning how to operate what was still equivalent to a power run, only with tempo and with the quarterback as a goalkeeper threat.

The effect was immediate: Northwestern increased from 110 to 10 in scoring offense, and against the mighty Michigan, the Wildcats rushed for 332 yards and threw 322 over 90 shots, outscoring the exhausted 18-6 Wolverines in the fourth quarter.

Wilson: “I think when we do that, people are like, ‘Wait a minute, this is not a ruse.’ “I think people are paying attention to that. Blue people? They are statistically one of the better defenses in the game. Not that it’s some bad Michigan team. That’s a good team. It’s not physical. It’s trickery.” Even though we change everything [that offseason], we dress everything, it’s still power, it’s still running downhill. “And it won the Northwestern part of the Big Ten title.

September 14, 2002: Bowling Green 53, Missouri 28

Another branch in the tree spread began to grow in 2001 when Bowling Green appointed former Notre Dame Urban Meyer accepting coach as head coach. The Falcons haven’t enjoyed a winning season in seven years but soon rise to 8-3.

Meyer and staff featuring Gregg Brandon’s successor and potential head coaches of the states of Mississippi and Florida Dan Mullen made violations around Josh Harris’s quarterback, and the violations occurred. BGSU averaged 41 points per game in 2002 and destroyed the Missouri team by seeing its own offensive revival with quarterback Brad Smith (who would eventually become the first quarterback with an average 2,000 / 1,000 season during his career). Harris threw for 311 yards, rushed for 66 and caught a 34-yard touchdown pass from receiver Cole Magner.

In the following season, Meyer took a head job in Utah. Two years and an unbeaten season later, he is in Florida, where he will win two national titles.

November 16, 2006: West Virginia 45, Pitt 27

After two productive years at Clemson, Rodriguez was hired to lead his alma mater, and he put the Mountaineers in 9-4 in his second season. They took part of the Big East title in 2003-04 and, with the first new defender – quarterback Pat White, ran back Steve Slaton – went 11-1 in 2005, setting Georgia on fire in the Sugar Bowl. The following season, Slaton and White broke the other “that should not be possible” barrier: In an 18 point game over rivals Pitt, White threw 204 yards and ran for 220, while Slaton ran for 215 and caught six passes for 130. That was 14 years ago and remains a surprising achievement.

WVU will win 11 matches in 2006 and win one at the BCS Championship in 2007, but Pitt will take revenge, frustrating White who limped and defeated mountaineers 13-9 in a classic resentment.

September 8, 2007: Oregon 39, Michigan 7

Almost overnight, Chip Kelly became the standard bearer for the rising tempo. Hired far from New Hampshire as offensive coordinator Mike Bellotti before the 2007 season, he had an average Ducks of 43 points per game nine games into the season. His second game was perhaps the most memorable: In Ann Arbor, against Lloyd Carr’s last Wolverines team, Dennis Dixon threw 292 yards, Jonathan Stewart and Jeremiah Johnson were combined for 200 rushing yards, and Dixon ran for 76 while printing on the most beautiful fake statue . play Liberty all the time.

Ducks was prioritized for one place in the 2007 national title game until Dixon tore his ACL in November. Three years later, with Kelly as head coach, they will indeed make the game title.

November 24, 2007: Missouri 36, Kansas 28

Do you want a sign that college football is turned on? What about Missouri and Kansas who played for No. 1 in the BCS standings?

Thanks to QB injuries and a series of disorders – Stanford on top of USC, Illinois at Ohio State, Kentucky and Arkansas on top of LSU, Texas Tech in Oklahoma, etc. – The 2007 title race is perhaps the most wide open in this sport. history. When Mizzou and Kansas meet at Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City, they are 21-1 combined, and the winner will be positioned for a shot in the national title game. Prospective finalist Heisman, Chase Daniel, completed 40 of 49 passes and Mizzou led 28-7 in the fourth quarter before experiencing a delay. The Sports Illustrated cover of the week read, “Mizzou, who is that?”

(This is college football, the oligarchs quickly counterattack. Oklahoma uses the second round of running to get past Mizzou in the Big 12 title game, and thanks also for the loss of WVU to Pitt, LSU heavyweights and the State of Ohio play for national titles. The world’s small fish will always have November 2007, though.)

November 1, 2008: Texas Tech 39, Texas 33

Fast word association game: When I say “vertical four,” what do you think? The odds are pretty good according to you, “Harrell to Crabtree.”

In his ninth season at Texas Tech, Mike Leach discovered a breakthrough. With a blue-chip quarterback (Graham Harrell) and the best recipient in college football (Michael Crabtree), the Red Raiders began 2008 10-0, thanks in part to this classic work. They raced to lead 19-0 against top-ranked Texas, but the Longhorns returned and led 33-32 with 89 seconds left. Eighty-eight seconds later, Crabtree scored the running of Four Verticals, perhaps the only combination of the most enduring and devastating routes of the era.

Tech rises to second place in the polls and destroys Oklahoma State No. 8 to organize what will be a winner-take-all fight against Oklahoma for the crown of the 12 Great South.

November 22, 2008: Oklahoma 65, Texas Tech 21

In 2002, Kevin Wilson left Northwestern to take the offensive coordinator job in Oklahoma. He became a solo OC a few years later, and in 2008 his Sooners attack became the most devastating offensive attack to date.

“I remember Kirk Herbstreit calling me in the preseason,” Wilson said, “and I said, listen, we will do things that are not of this complexity, but we will be different. We will not be like Northwestern and continue to spread all the time. “I get Jermaine Gresham, and he will play in the slot and in the tight end. I get DeMarco Murray, he will play tailback and play in the slot. I have a son named Brody Eldridge, and he will play fullback and tight. I will change from great. be a little without replacing, and I’ll leave as fast as crap. I think we have a chance to be somewhat different. “

Everything the current offensive coordinator does, mixes formation and tempo to create a mismatch, which was done by the 2008 Sooners in droves. They averaged 48 points per game through eight games, then somehow found another gear, scoring 60-plus for five consecutive weeks. (That could be six straight, as Wilson pointed out: “We beat Kansas State 55-3 in the first round, but we just kicked a field goal in the second round.”)

This is a rumor Tech saw in late 2008. “Let me tell you about Mike [Leach]Tim, “said Wilson.” When Mike’s team is good, they are physical and dirty and they play well, and that is a very good team. They are a very hot team, and we are just a hotter team. With no huddle and spread – rather like [UNLV] Runnin ‘Rebels in basketball – if you get cold sometimes you can look very bad, but when you run … when you get hot … it can be fun. “A spectacular statement.

November 22, 2008: Abilene Christian 93, A&M West Texas 68

While FBS experienced an offensive revival in 2008, as is likely to happen, the is it right wild things happen at the bottom level. In the second half of the Division II playoffs, Abilene Christian and West Texas A&M featured 161 points and 1,531 yards. This will be a high score for a basketball game. ACU led 42-34 in the first round and used the THIRD QUARTER 37-POINT to distance themselves.

Bernard Scott of Abilene Christian, rushed for 292 yards and six scores, and Billy Malone completed 16 of 25 passes for 383 yards and six goals for six different recipients (including Scott). A & M’s Keith Null rose 42-for-63 to 595 and seven goals; 14 of the settlements went to Charly Martin, who got 323 yards and scored five times. Perhaps the biggest surprise: There are four kicks!

The A&M head coach at that time? Don Carthel, coach of the UTEP offensive track when Mumme was the offensive coordinator. Everything ties together.

January 8, 2009: Florida 24, Oklahoma 14

In the national title battle of two early adopters of deployment, Urban Meyer Gators found excellence.

Oklahoma controlled the first half, but Florida made two goal lines – the fourth stop down and interception deflected – to buy itself time. In the second half, Tim Tebow from Florida (231 yards passed, 109 yards hurried) and Percy Harvin (171 meters in total rushed and received) took over. Florida led 17-14 at the start of the fourth quarter and, after another interception in his area, scored the title with a seven-minute, 76-yard touchdown drive. The Sooners have formation and tempo, but the Gators have the best run and Oklahoma secondary games to have faced all seasons.

January 4, 2012: West Virginia 70, Clemson 33

This game has an impact both in the present and the future. First, it provides proof of concept for Dana Holgorsen, a former Iowa Wesleyan recipient under Mumme and a former Texas Tech assistant under Leach. He had taken over for Bill Stewart, Rodriguez’s successor at WVU when Rodriguez left for Michigan, and in his first season he led Mountain Climbers to 10 wins and a demonstrative Orange Bowl victory. (And because one of the games that was dominated by WVU, it also introduced the world to Bob Stitt, crazy-head scientist at the Colorado School of Mining at the time and soon became a cult favorite between spread-heads.)

Over time, WVU’s victory was also known for the series of events he set in motion. Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney fired defensive coordinator Kevin Steele, replacing him with Brent Venables from Oklahoma, who then made one of the most modern and dynamic defenses in college football. Steele, meanwhile, returned to the drawing board and appeared at the end of the decade as other one of the most effective defensive coaches of the game at Auburn. Failure remains the best teacher in life.

November 10, 2012: Texas A&M 29, Alabama 24

The realignment of the conference proceeded roughly in the early 2010s, in a process that allowed us to answer what had hitherto been a hypothetical question: Can the Big 12 violations win on average, a powerful SEC?

Yes The answer is always yes.

Maybe you would prefer the symbolism of the Big 12 Missouri transplant to reach the SEC title game, and almost the BCS Championship, in its second season in the league. But because of his honesty, it is difficult to be at the top of Texas A&M, with a slick freshman quarterback (Johnny Manziel) and a coach with a sterling pedigree spread (Kevin Sumlin) defeating the national champions who retained at Tuscaloosa.

A&M scored the first three drives to lead 20-0. Crimson Tide cut the deficit to three in the fourth quarter, but the determined Aggies scored two goals and forced two turnovers to seal the victory. A&M will win 11 matches, and Manziel will be the first freshman to win the Heisman.

November 7, 2013: Baylor 41, Oklahoma 12

The most impressive thing about this game is not the difference in score of 29 points – it is the fact that Baylor offense doesn’t even play well. The Bears entered the game with an average of 69 points per game (!) And 9.0 yards per game and succeeded only 41 and 5.7, respectively, towards the standard bearers of the conference.

Thursday night, the main-time insult from blue blood of college football was the highest point for Art Briles’ tenure at Baylor. Through his own interpretation of Air Strike – which stretches the defense even further, and creates more big games than any other offense – Leach’s former assistant and successful high school head coach has revived a near-death program and brought Heisman to Waco, Texas, through exploitation quarterback Robert Griffin III. Then, with Bryce Petty behind the center in 2013, the Bears were even more dangerous, at least until the path of decline against the State of Oklahoma knocked them out of a national title contention.

November 30, 2013: Auburn 34, Alabama 28

The run-pass option – or “POP” pass, as some people called it at the time – introduced himself into the lexicon in one of the biggest games in the history of famous college football. While we remember the 2013 Iron Bowl as the Kick Six thanks to Chris Davis’s last second return, 109 yards from missed goals, what happened 32 seconds from the previous action might have a more lasting effect: Auburn quarterback Nick Marshall defended the ball at what appeared into a reading zone, but right when he seemed to be crossing the soccer practice line, he threw the ball at Sammie Coates, who ran on the sidelines for a 39-yard touchdown.

Gus Malzahn is a famous high school coach and offensive mind who has served as Auburn’s offensive coordinator during the Tiger’s national title running in 2010. Only in his 12th game as AU head coach, he has contributed forever to the knowledge of college football . Auburn won the SEC title and almost defeated Florida State in the BCS title game.

October 22, 2016: Oklahoma 66, Texas Tech 59

By the mid-2010s, principles of dissemination such as tempo and reading zones had long been part of the sport, and the RPO took over, as far as even seemingly old school teams such as Penn State drove them. for the title of the Big Ten. But the Big 12 are still looking for ways to push the envelope, never more than in this silly midfielder battle between the future of pick No. 1 Oklahoma Baker Mayfield and NFL MVP for future Texas Tech Patrick Mahomes.

Mayfield did 545 yards and seven goals, the Sooners’ Joe Mixon gained 377 combined rushed and received yards and Dede Westbrook catch nine balls for 202. On the other side of the field, Mahomes finishes 52 of 88 passes and is credited with 85 rushing yards. The team joins for 185 snaps and 1,702 yards (854 each), and OU basically wins because it scores in the final six treasure, while Tech does it only in the end five. When you combine unmatched offensive talent with an almost perfect offensive scheme (and, yes, lack of suitable defensive talent), this is what happens.

January 9, 2017: Clemson 35, Alabama 31

In early 2012, after facing a fast Ole Miss attack (which would defeat his team in 2014 and 2015), Alabama coach Nick Saban famously asked, “Is this what we want with football?” The joke since then is that he didn’t ask out of desperation – he just wanted to confirm before adopting his own principle of spread. He hired Lane Kiffin to modernize his attack, and Bama won the 2015 national title with it. But in 2016, Bama was defeated by another conspicuous spread interpretation.

The Tide led 24-14 in the fourth quarter, but Swinney’s Clemson controlled football, eventually winning the ball 99 times to Bama’s 66, and even a defense as deep as Saban withered. The Tigers scored at the start of the fourth quarter, then drove 156 yards in less than four minutes on their last two possession. Deshaun Watson, 36-for-56 for 420 yards in total, press Hunter Renfrow to score 2 yards with one second left, and Clemson has his first title in 36 years.

January 8, 2018: Alabama 26, Georgia 23

It’s called “Seattle” in the Alabama guidebook. In general, it is Four Verticals.

When the dominant college football program has adopted your basic principles, the battle is won.

November 19, 2018: Los Angeles Rams 54. Kansas City Chief 48

We sometimes overestimate NFL “lecture-licensing” – NFL blocking rules make RPO options a little more limited, NFL defenses are adjusted almost overnight to slow down tempo teams like Chip Kelly’s Philadelphia Eagles, and there is always a schematic difference when there are fewer talent gains.

That said, the offensive talent that trickles into the NFL has been oriented towards spreading for a while, and that has a clear effect, never more than in this game. Perhaps the two most famous offensive head coaches currently in the league (Andy Reid from Kansas City and Sean McVay from Los Angeles) lead as two former Air Raid stars (Texas Tech’s Mahomes and Cal’s Jared Goff, trained in college, respectively, by former Tech quarterback Kliff Kingsbury and former Tech assistant Sonny Dykes) combined to throw 891 yards and 10 goals.

This is almost the same as the 12 great style penalties as you will see in the NFL, and it is no accident that it is also considered one of the most entertaining games in league history.

November 9, 2019: LSU 46, Alabama 41

Among the ruling classes of campus football, LSU was one of the last scattered arrests, continuing to spread Big Burly Manball through the Les Miles era and entering the first years of Ed Orgeron’s tenure. Orgeron expressed the desire for modernization but at first could not unite all the parts. But oh, did everything come together in 2019.

With a veteran quarterback Joe Burrow, one of the most talented receiving corps you have ever seen and some additional energy in the guidebook provided by new assistant Joe Brady, LSU put together perhaps the best offensive season of all time. Despite playing half of the top 10 SP + end of the season, the Tigers lead the nation with 48 points and 568 yards per game. Burrow posted FBS’s first 200 passers, completing 76% of his operations for 5,671 yards, 60 touchdowns and only six interceptions.

Bama prevented a big game better than most against LSU and fired Burrow five times, but Burrow still finished 31 of 39 passes, and Clyde Edwards-Helaire gained a combined 180 meters at 29 in a hurry and reception. The Tigers advanced to the first-half lead, and although Crimson Tide retaliated, cutting the 20-point deficit to one score three times in the fourth quarter, LSU responded with a touchdown drive each time. Tigers are forced to use their vast arsenal to win, and they do.

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