Alabama Football: Practice Notebook, Oct. 17

Oct 13, 2012; Columbia, MO, USA; Alabama Crimson Tide wide receiver Cyrus Jones (8) runs the ball in the third quarter of the game against the Missouri Tigers at Farout Field. The Crimson Tide won 42-10. Mandatory Credit: Denny Medley-US PRESSWIRE

Alabama knows a little something about promising seasons being derailed by injury.

Flashback to 2005. Alabama was 5-0 after earning what was widely considered former head coach Mike Shula’s “signature win” over the Florida Gators, 31-3. The Crimson Tide was averaging just under 30 points per game, three of them against Southeastern Conference opponents and another against a very respectable Southern Miss team.

Alabama reached the 30-point mark only once the rest of the season, in a blowout of Utah State, as its offense broke just as quickly and horrifically as every bone in the lower half of Tyrone Prothro’s leg did.

Alabama finds itself threatening at a similar situation in 2012, as the Tide has lost DeAndrew White, Jalston Fowler and Dee Hart for the season to knee injuries and recently had scares with both Christion Jones and AJ McCarron.

Even with most of the impact being felt on the special teams units, Alabama head coach Nick Saban remains confident.

“Cyrus (Jones) did a good job last week,” Saban said. “He’s really got good hands, good ball judgement. We’re totally confident that he can do the job. He’s got a really good burst. He’s elusive in space.

“Deion Belue can do it. Amari Cooper can do it. We probably have more guys that are decent at doing that than we’ve had in the past.”

Do it, I dare you

Most defenses, especially those that live and die with man-to-man coverage, are cautious when a verticality-oriented passing scheme is staring them down.

Not the Tide. Alabama cornerback Dee Milliner, likely to find himself on many-a-island against the Volunteers, welcomes the challenge.

“They’ve got two receivers, Justin Hunter and (Cordarelle) Patterson that are probably two of the best we’ve faced this year,” Milliner said.

Milliner said he is very much looking forward to being challenged vertically.

“I always look for a challenge in a game,” Milliner said. “Hopefully I’m in position to make a great play on the ball.”

Perfecting an art

Most coaches, even most special teams coaches, will agree that coaching kicking is one of football’s most difficult tasks. It requires a completely different type of coaching.

“We don’t try to develop all of our kickers like, ‘This is how you have to do it,'” Saban said.

The Alabama coaching staff branches into a different sport for its philosophy on teaching kickers.

“It’s more like we use the analogy of a good golf swing,” Saban said. “I guess a really good golf coach would look at your golf swing or my golf swing and decide how we need to fix what he needs to do fundamentally to play better. And those become the benchmarks of what’s important for that particular person and his swing.

“The golf coach that tries to build everybody to swing the same from the ground up may mess a lot of people up. OK, so what we do is when we do have instructors here that are here in some camp or for whatever they’re here for, we kind of get the benchmarks as coaches because they’re not allowed to coach our players as to what we need to make sure our guys are doing to be fundamentally and technically sound in what they’re doing.”

From the additional help that the coaching staff receives from more trained kicking teachers is how it helps the players during the season.

“If a guy strays away from that then we make those corrections and try to get them back to where he needs to be to really focus on the things that are important and be able to execute,” Saban said. “So to say we don’t coach the kickers in the season, that’s not really correct.

“I’m saying we’re not out there everyday trying to get them to change something so they can do better. That’s not what we do. We’re just making sure they’re doing the things they need to do as benchmarks of what helps them execute with consistency so we watch those things very closely.”