A win’s a win, right?
In one of the sloppiest games in recent memory, Alabama survived its trip to Fayetteville with a 14-13 win over Arkansas.
What started as some good ol’ ugly SEC football became a comedy of errors for both teams, complete with five turnovers combined — Alabama recovered a couple would-be fumbles — and a severe lack of offense from both teams. But head coach Nick Saban was more upbeat than expected, saying how proud he was of the team in his postgame press conference.
“You could say we made a lot of mistakes, which we did, but we overcame them in the game,” Saban said. “There’s a lot of things that we can correct and there’s a lot things that we can get better. But when your players play with that kind of heart, you got to be really proud of them for the way they competed in the game and how hard they played…My hat’s off to them.”
Other than winning the game, this outing was a bit historic. Tonight was Saban’s 100th game coaching the Crimson Tide. He joins Frank Thomas and Bear Bryant as the only coaches hit the century mark at Alabama. It just happened to be one of his more stressful outings.
The special teams play, primarily in the punt and kickoff return game, is an open, festering wound for Alabama. While punter JK Scott has been close to perfect, averaging punts of more than 44 yards tonight and regularly pinning Arkansas below the 20, the fumbles and dumbfounding decisions from the coverage teams and the returners were staggering. Alabama fumbled it four times but only lost two of them, and it seemed like the ball was greased on many of the Crimson Tide’s plays.
Besides the special teams, the bleak 14-point scoreline shows an offense that was completely out of sync.
As I delete my feature on Lane Kiffin leading Alabama’s greatest offense ever, it is my duty to inform that the Crimson Tide had seven whole yards in the first quarter, the lowest yardage total for any Alabama team under Saban, and ultimately managed only 227 total yards all night.
“We need to work to get our guys better,” Saban said. “I feel like our offensive line is capable of doing a good job. We did not play well up front today, we weren’t able to run the ball with consistency and we didn’t throw it well either. We just didn’t play well on offense all around.”
The play that was a microcosm of the entire game for Alabama’s offense was the quarterback sneak on 4th and 1. Instead of going low and “sneaking” into first down territory, quarterback Blake Sims jumped vertically in the air and obviously gained no yards. Kiffin turned to Saban and said (through television lip-reading), “What is that? What is he doing?” Kiffin was understandably confused, as was every media member. Even Saban was confused.
“That was the ugliest-looking QB sneak I ever saw,” Saban said. “We teach the guy how to run the quarterback sneak and we never ever taught that…Lane wanted to run a different play, I didn’t really wanna hand the ball off, I thought we could get two inches and I was wrong.”
While the #FireLaneKiffin and #LameKiffin tweets flooded in, the offense did finally settle down and end the game once Kiffin removed his strange wide receiver glove he had on his left hand. But the offense still didn’t look that great. The play calling became stagnant, and the execution just wasn’t there for Alabama. But Sims praised the resiliency of the unit, saying they used last week’s loss to propel them tonight.
“The loss hurt us bad because we knew we were probably better than the other team,” Sims said. “All the leaders stood up and said ‘Hey this is not the way we do it, this is not the ‘Bama way.’ And hopefully our guys can realize, if we practice like this during the week these are the results that we get.”
Sloppiness was the theme of the entire night for both teams, but Alabama’s defense was the difference. With as many three-and-outs and turnovers as Alabama had, Arkansas couldn’t convert any of them for points.
If anything, this game was a return to form of the defense, especially the front seven, with a special commendation to defensive lineman A’Shawn Robinson who blocked Arkansas’ second extra point, allowing Alabama to win by one point.
The four-man rush from the Crimson Tide never gave Arkansas quarterback Brandon Allen any time to throw and forced him to scramble constantly. The defense also held the Razorbacks’ normally powerful ground attack, which entered Saturday averaging 316 rushing yards per game, to a season-low 89 yards. And the defense came through the most when it really counted, holding the Razorbacks to five rushing yards in the entire second half. The secondary was still porous at times, allowing Allen to throw for 246 yards after averaging 150 yards before this game, but finished the game strong with safety Landon Collins intercepting Allen with two minutes remaining, essentially icing the game for Alabama.
But before the game-winning interception happened, the game-winning touchdown had to be scored, which was a six-yard touchdown pass from Sims to wide receiver DeAndrew White after an eight-play, 56-yard drive.
Sims credited the offense’s motivation to how hard the defense was playing.
“Our offense looked the defense in the eye and was like, ‘Hey, they’re fighting hard for us, come on let’s do the same thing for them,’” Sims said. “I think that was the main thing for us.”
So, as much as we can debate about who should be fired (no one, calm down) or what went wrong (lots of stuff), the Crimson Tide are still in the hunt for the College Football Playoff, depending on which team shows up for the rest of the season.
“We played a lot harder in this game than we did last week,” Saban said. “The players really wanted to win the game.
“We played at Ole Miss more like a team that was trying to keep from getting beat. Our guys went out there today and played aggressive at the end and made some third down stops that were huge.”
Follow Jonathan on Twitter @Jonathan_Biles
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