At times is was shockingly great football, at other times it was painfully sloppy, but in Saturday’s 42-21 victory over Florida, the only team that got in Alabama’s way was Alabama.
“I’m really proud of the way our guys overcame adversity in this game,” said Alabama head coach Nick Saban. “I wish we didn’t do the bad things but we did them, we hung in there, and we played the next play. We eventually got control of the game, which speaks a lot about the competitive nature that the players have. They just kept hanging in there.”
The game got off to a slow start. The first quarter alone took an hour to complete. Rampant turnovers and big plays then made Saturday night in Tuscaloosa feel like a shootout that wasn’t really a shootout, with Alabama letting Florida hang around for a while before slamming the door.
“The Florida win is fantastic for us,” safety Landon Collins said after the game. “It’s SEC play and one of the big games that you have to win because it can make or break your season.”
Here are three takeaways from Alabama’s SEC opening win:
Blake Sims took command
The quarterback battle that was pretty much rendered irrelevant last week officially ended today. Blake Sims torched the Gators with tons of passing, some scrambling and tight decision-making.
Sims finished with a career-high 445 yards passing and four touchdowns, giving him the second-highest yardage of any Alabama player in a single game, behind Scott Hunter’s 484 yards in the 1969 Iron Bowl. Sims surpassed his career high in passing in the first half alone, aided by long bombs to Kenyan Drake and Amari Cooper.
The turnovers were problematic, but Sims accepted them and moved on, motivating his team to keep driving for the win.
“When Blake takes what the defense gives, he’s instinctive and he makes good plays and decisions,” Saban said of his fifth-year senior quarterback. “He made a couple of nice plays scrambling today, which is going to be a real asset for him.”
Everyone knew that Sims could do some damage with his legs, but on Saturday he quieted the critics who have said for weeks that he can’t throw the deep ball. He hit Kenyan Drake in stride on the first play of the game for an 87-yard touchdown, and later did the same to Cooper on a 79-yard strike.
“People have to respect him as a passer,” Saban said. “He has made too many plays and too many good throws for people to not respect him as a passer. He’s done a really good job for us.”
Sims left midway through the third quarter with a shoulder injury, but reemerged from the locker room to a rousing ovation from the fans. He’s their quarterback now, even though he had to overcome the doubters.
“I don’t really think about the doubts,” Sims said. “When I ran back out and heard them cheering me on it made me want to get out there and perform and be with my team again and go get the W.”
You get a turnover and you get a turnover and you get a turnover
Alabama had an abysmal first half as far as turnovers and penalties were concerned.
The Tide had not turned the ball over this much since it had five against Oklahoma in the Sugar Bowl. It seemed like everyone wanted a fumble just to make the stat line more even. Kenyan Drake, DeAndrew White and Blake Sims coughed up the ball and Sims threw an interception. Alabama also had 11 penalties for 80 yards, something else oddly uncharacteristic about this game.
“This is not something that we want to be a part of our team, in terms of how we execute and what we do,” Saban said. “Eleven penalties are not something that we want to be a part of how our team plays. There will come a time when we won’t be able to overcome these things, but these things are all correctable.”
Florida, for good measure, also turned the ball over three times, throwing two picks, which were Alabama’s first forced interceptions since the first quarter of the aforementioned Sugar Bowl.
“Everybody was holding the ball out wide and it just took for someone like me to just talk to everybody and tell them to hold the ball, that they were making too many turnovers and they capitalized off our turnovers,” fullback Jalston Fowler said. “If we just cut out the turnovers, ain’t no telling what we could do.”
Alabama’s defense had a strong performance putting constant pressure on the quarterback, stopping the run, and keeping Florida’s explosive plays to a minimum. The Gators would have had a difficult time scoring at all if it weren’t for the turnovers.
Having Amari Cooper on the team is an unfair advantage
The talk going into the weekend was that Florida’s All-SEC cornerback Vernon Hargreaves III would slow Cooper down and knock him off of his record-setting pace. That didn’t happen.
No. 9 apparently can’t be stopped, even by one of the best cover corners in the country. He finished today with 201 yards receiving and three touchdowns, giving him an Alabama-record 20 for his career. Cooper had 736 total receiving yards during his injury-shortened 2013 season. He already has 655 through just four games this year.
But Cooper’s performance Saturday was nothing out of the ordinary for him, according to his teammates.
“You can expect it,” Fowler said. “He goes hard at practice all the time like that. He just works. That’s just Amari.”
The Biletnikoff Award for the best receiver in the country should already be in the mail, and Cooper deserves to appear on every Heisman candidate list from this week on.
“[Cooper] was very impressive,” Sims said. “He put on a good show for everybody today.”
Alabama now heads into an off week, with a trip to tenth-ranked Ole Miss coming up next on Oct. 4.
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