[lex24]

The Tide will roll on. And on, and on. It's no mystery as to why and how. What, if anything, can Stanford football learn from this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/opini...tball.html

That it’s quite nice to be able to have the top recruiting class in the nation every year?  Saban is a great coach.  But of course he never lines up against a team with superior talent.  Just like Urban M.  Until he went to the NFL and showed his limitations. Saban didn’t fare too well in NFL either.

I could only read part of the article, then the paywall hit.  I get that Saban brings in top level assistants, changes things up etc.  All well and good.  And all possible because he has the best players in America every year.  As for his bringing in top level OC’s and DC’s do you think any would even consider Stanford? 

Comparing Alabama to Stanford is like comparing Filet Mignon to cube steak.  I don’t care how great a chef one is, the Filet will always be better…..

You want to find a comparison - look at what Wisconsin and Iowa do.  Year after year they win.  With good not great talent.  They do so by building top rate offensive lines and playing excellent defense.  They control clock.  They beat their opponents physically.  Then they run into OSU (when scheduled) and get waxed.  Why?  Cause OSU always has better athletes. (As a reminder the greatest offensive football mind of the last 60 years managed 7 points vs. USC in two years.  Cause SC was able to dominate physically.)

No argument here. As for the paywall, here's money-shot content (pay particular attention to the second paragraph).

When people complain about Alabama’s dominance, they’re missing the point. To me, Alabama is sports at its best: not the wonder of competition or the joy of watching an underdog come out on top (obviously, though that’s pretty awesome, too), but the terror and awe of watching a behemoth. That term, “behemoth,” comes from Chapter 40 of the Book of Job, by the way, in which God describes a creature so powerful only he can kill it. “Its tail sways like a cedar,” its limbs are like “rods of iron,” the Lord says, and “a raging river does not alarm it.” And if you’ve ever seen Alabama play at home in the fourth quarter of a game against a feisty but overmatched opponent, well, this probably sounds pretty familiar.
[/url]
And Alabama, like any good villain, is fully sentient, always learning, always improving, always finding new and even more terrifying ways to decimate its opponents. Over the past four seasons, Alabama has become more creative and dynamic on offense, averaging 488 yards per game in 2021. In 2015, the Tide averaged 427 yards of offense per game. No surprise, the 2015 version of Alabama still won a national title.
Of course, teams do, on occasion, beat Alabama, as we saw this week. Since the 2010-2011 season, Alabama has lost a total of 17 games. (For comparison, Michigan State, which is really good, has lost 47 games in the same period.) I think I remember parts of all of them: In 2021, there was Rachel House Small, the wife of Texas A&M kicker Seth Small, holding hands with Seth’s mother as her husband kicked the game-winning field goal to defeat Alabama, then leaping onto the field to celebrate in a moment that became pandemonium.

And, in 2013, the Auburn University Marching Band’s ebullient, emotional, exhilarating reaction to Auburn’s defeat of Alabama on a last-second field goal returned for a touchdown in one of the most incredible moments in college football history, the “Kick Six.” I watched that game on a laptop in London, and I can tell you what the bedroom I was in looked like and how fuzzy the internet connection was. That’s what happens when you’re Alabama — your losses are so rare that they become precious jewels of football memorabilia.

It’s important to remember that the Tide went 7-6 in Coach Nick Saban’s first year in Tuscaloosa back in 2007, and before his arrival, the Alabama football teams of the early 2000s were sometimes pretty good and sometimes kind of mediocre. The year I was born, 1987, Alabama went 7-5. It was another team, the Miami Hurricanes, that finished 12-0 that year and won the national championship, part of an era for that team when it was so utterly superior to its opponents that the players had plenty of opportunities to invent new end zone celebrations.

Someday, Alabama won’t be Alabama anymore. Let’s appreciate this thing of beauty — or, more accurately, this unstoppable hell beast from the great beyond — while we can.
[url=https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/opinion/gop-trump-big-lie.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article]

Thanks.  Interesting article .  And I get the always improving/evolving.  Much easier to do when you are the top dog.  Particularly when you are at a University that is football royalty.

Coaching is a tough profession.  Getting to the top is tough. Staying there, tougher.  LSU, Orgeron and Brady are great examples.  Orgeron  on top of the world, Brady the new “it” offensive mind.  Then Burrow and Chase graduated. Along with a slew of other players that were high NFL picks.  Orgeron is out.  Meanwhile, Brady goes to Carolina, bombs out and is gone.

Believe it or not, Gail, I agree with the criticism of Shaw not changing assistant coaches. I just don’t draw anything from Alabama.

[lex24]

The Tide will roll on. And on, and on. It's no mystery as to why and how. What, if anything, can Stanford football learn from this?
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/15/opini...tball.html

That it’s quite nice to be able to have the top recruiting class in the nation every year?  Saban is a great coach.  But of course he never lines up against a team with superior talent.  Just like Urban M.  Until he went to the NFL and showed his limitations. Saban didn’t fare too well in NFL either.

I could only read part of the article, then the paywall hit.  I get that Saban brings in top level assistants, changes things up etc.  All well and good.  And all possible because he has the best players in America every year.  As for his bringing in top level OC’s and DC’s do you think any would even consider Stanford? 

Comparing Alabama to Stanford is like comparing Filet Mignon to cube steak.  I don’t care how great a chef one is, the Filet will always be better…..

You want to find a comparison - look at what Wisconsin and Iowa do.  Year after year they win.  With good not great talent.  They do so by building top rate offensive lines and playing excellent defense.  They control clock.  They beat their opponents physically.  Then they run into OSU (when scheduled) and get waxed.  Why?  Cause OSU always has better athletes. (As a reminder the greatest offensive football mind of the last 60 years managed 7 points vs. USC in two years.  Cause SC was able to dominate physically.)

No argument here. As for the paywall, here's money-shot content (pay particular attention to the second paragraph).

When people complain about Alabama’s dominance, they’re missing the point. To me, Alabama is sports at its best: not the wonder of competition or the joy of watching an underdog come out on top (obviously, though that’s pretty awesome, too), but the terror and awe of watching a behemoth. That term, “behemoth,” comes from Chapter 40 of the Book of Job, by the way, in which God describes a creature so powerful only he can kill it. “Its tail sways like a cedar,” its limbs are like “rods of iron,” the Lord says, and “a raging river does not alarm it.” And if you’ve ever seen Alabama play at home in the fourth quarter of a game against a feisty but overmatched opponent, well, this probably sounds pretty familiar.
[/url]
And Alabama, like any good villain, is fully sentient, always learning, always improving, always finding new and even more terrifying ways to decimate its opponents. Over the past four seasons, Alabama has become more creative and dynamic on offense, averaging 488 yards per game in 2021. In 2015, the Tide averaged 427 yards of offense per game. No surprise, the 2015 version of Alabama still won a national title.
Of course, teams do, on occasion, beat Alabama, as we saw this week. Since the 2010-2011 season, Alabama has lost a total of 17 games. (For comparison, Michigan State, which is really good, has lost 47 games in the same period.) I think I remember parts of all of them: In 2021, there was Rachel House Small, the wife of Texas A&M kicker Seth Small, holding hands with Seth’s mother as her husband kicked the game-winning field goal to defeat Alabama, then leaping onto the field to celebrate in a moment that became pandemonium.

And, in 2013, the Auburn University Marching Band’s ebullient, emotional, exhilarating reaction to Auburn’s defeat of Alabama on a last-second field goal returned for a touchdown in one of the most incredible moments in college football history, the “Kick Six.” I watched that game on a laptop in London, and I can tell you what the bedroom I was in looked like and how fuzzy the internet connection was. That’s what happens when you’re Alabama — your losses are so rare that they become precious jewels of football memorabilia.

It’s important to remember that the Tide went 7-6 in Coach Nick Saban’s first year in Tuscaloosa back in 2007, and before his arrival, the Alabama football teams of the early 2000s were sometimes pretty good and sometimes kind of mediocre. The year I was born, 1987, Alabama went 7-5. It was another team, the Miami Hurricanes, that finished 12-0 that year and won the national championship, part of an era for that team when it was so utterly superior to its opponents that the players had plenty of opportunities to invent new end zone celebrations.

Someday, Alabama won’t be Alabama anymore. Let’s appreciate this thing of beauty — or, more accurately, this unstoppable hell beast from the great beyond — while we can.
[url=https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/12/opinion/gop-trump-big-lie.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article]

Thanks.  Interesting article .  And I get the always improving/evolving.  Much easier to do when you are the top dog.  Particularly when you are at a University that is football royalty.

Coaching is a tough profession.  Getting to the top is tough. Staying there, tougher.  LSU, Orgeron and Brady are great examples.  Orgeron  on top of the world, Brady the new “it” offensive mind.  Then Burrow and Chase graduated. Along with a slew of other players that were high NFL picks.  Orgeron is out.  Meanwhile, Brady goes to Carolina, bombs out and is gone.

Believe it or not, Gail, I agree with the criticism of Shaw not changing assistant coaches. I just don’t draw anything from Alabama.