Alabama Football: Kirby’s scared of the Old Man

The Alabama football team came away with another white-knuckler against the Dawgs in the SEC Championship on Saturday and UGA head coach Kirby Smart’s curious decision to call a fake punt late in the 4th quarter near midfield proved he didn’t have faith in another overtime against Nick Saban.

First of all, much praise needs to be heaped upon Alabama football quarterback Jalen Hurts. You can’t convince me that if that kid had to go 80 yards in three minutes instead of 50, that he still wouldn’t get it done. UGA’s defense was so dialed into defending Tua that the very idea of having to deal with Jalen looked foreign to them once he entered the game.

Now that we have that out of the way, Kirby Smart is a weird fella.

With just over three minutes to go in the game, Smart and his staff dialed up a fake punt on 4th & 11 near the 50-yard line. As Smart describes it, the play was there. UGA backup QB Justin Fields was to take the snap and hit a wide open receiver for a first down, maybe more.

"I talked to the guys before the game about it. If we get an opportunity to run it, we’ll run it. It was there. We just didn’t get the opportunity to get it snapped before they covered the guy."

You hear him describe it, you believe that he believes what he’s saying. And who’s to say that it wouldn’t have worked? Unfortunately for him, Alabama was playing punt safe the entire time (I don’t know where Kirby gets the idea that the Tide weren’t in position to defend it from the outset) and Fields had nowhere to go with it but for a two-yard run.

Go back and watch the play. The Alabama football defense recognizes that Fields is lined up, they signal to one another to watch for the fake, they rush him when he takes the ball and they make the stop. It was textbook.

I admire the temerity of Smart to try to end the game right there. I really do. Part of me thinks that when he saw his former boss call an onside kick early in the 4th quarter against Clemson in 2016 that it was his time to pull off the same kind of heroics.

There’s a small problem with that, though, and it has nothing to do with the “you just don’t do that against Saban” fallacy: Smart’s team was the far and away better squad on Saturday.

That night in Arizona, Saban believed that they needed the onside kick against Clemson because his defense wasn’t stopping them. For the most part on Saturday, UGA was stopping a potent Tide offense. Why play with fire with so much on the line, so late in the game?

And the only answer I can come up with is that Smart had little to no faith in UGA being able to handle yet another overtime with an Alabama football team. My fellow contributor at Bama Hammer, Chris Dodson, put it succinctly: he snapped. He wanted the game over and done with by the end of regulation because he didn’t want to deal with the same feeling he had in January.

If that’s the case, then I totally get it. However, there’s more dignity in a hard-fought game in overtime than placing your team in a near-impossible situation with a streaking Tide offense. Play the odds and trust your defense can keep them out of the endzone from 80 yards out instead of 50.

Kirby Smart made a boneheaded decision because he believed in himself, not his team. It was selfish and it just showed this Bama Hammer contributor that he’s still shaken by the old man.

Will Kirby ever fully remove himself from Nick Saban’s shadow? Maybe so and maybe not – but not until he stops trying too hard.