Alabama Football: Reuben Foster, Australian For Fear
By Mike McCrary
Alabama football has a mighty weapon in linebacker Reuben Foster, and if the folks down under were talking about him they’d say this Foster was”Australian for fear“.
No, Alabama linebacker Reuben Foster is not from the land down under. He’s from somewhere else. Another planet, maybe. A world far, far away where they manufacture fist-shaking, vein-popping, armor-wearing savages on some sort of next next next-gen assembly line.
Oh alright. He’s from Auburn, Alabama. But when you think about it, that’s sort of like a whole different world.
Wherever the hell Foster came from, opposing offenses wish he’d have stayed there. The one-time can’t miss prospect has spent his entire Tide career not missing. He doesn’t miss games. He doesn’t miss assignments. And he doesn’t miss tackles.
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Foster burst onto the scene in 2014 by knocking LSU’s Leonard Fournette right out of this world and into a place where everything is blurry and vague and confusing, and you have no idea how many fingers that stranger is holding up.
And he hasn’t stopped since.
The scary thing is, Foster is not alone. He’s a one-man wrecking crew surrounded by a stampede of other one-man wrecking crews. Jonathan Allen. Tim Williams. Ryan Anderson. And the beat (down) goes on.
These men at work don’t tackle opposing ball carriers so much as they turn them into chalk outlines. They change game plans. They strike fear in people. They get elite-level offensive players to strongly consider whether they want to pass (or run) that way again.
Make no mistake: with Foster and company on the other side of the ball, it’s best to look both ways before you cross the line of scrimmage.
When the Washington Huskies come to Atlanta hell bent on pulling the upset, it’s the Alabama front seven on defense that will ultimately decide the game. As is almost always the case, it will be by far the biggest mismatch on the field. The Tide should roll, and by early in the fourth quarter, the Huskies will likely have rolled over.
Enjoy it while it lasts, Tide fans. Because in one or two games, Foster, along with several of his teammates, will don the tradition-rich Alabama jersey for the last time. He’ll say good-bye to those glorious fall Saturdays with his fellow crimson-clad savages. Good-bye to the fans, to the Process, and to those other-worldly collisions on the Bryant Denny Stadium turf.
And that, Foster will miss.