Alabama Football: Reasons, not excuses for how last season ended

Chatter about the Alabama football national championship failure will subside soon. Understanding the reasons it happened should continue.

Since SEC Media Days, national chatter has been focused on Alabama football making excuses for the national championship loss to Clemson. The most recurrent claim is the Crimson Tide program failing to admit it was outplayed and outcoached.

As a brief aside, within hours of the National Championship game, Bama Hammer gave Clemson full credit for being the better team with a far better game plan. The Tigers played with confidence because going in the team had been fully prepared to neutralize Alabama football strengths and take advantage of the Tide’s weaknesses.

Recently, Nick Saban and some Tide players commented on the erosion of proper attention to detail that seeped in during the latter stage of the season. Nick Saban explained much of the problem was departing coaches, not giving their full attention to CFB Playoff preparation. Tua Tagovailoa called it ‘scoreboard-watching’ in his interpretation of too much focus on outcome, rather than process.

Many in the national media labeled Saban’s comment as not just as an excuse, but also a failure to give Clemson any credit. Our response is Nick has given Clemson considerable credit since the game.

There is such Alabama fatigue, a chance to discredit Saban will rarely be ignored. The problem with the ‘excuse’ complaint against Nick is he is the most forward-focused coach in college football. ‘What’s next’ could be his motto – as in what can we learn, how can we improve, what work must be done today, tomorrow …

Nick Saban has been looking for reasons why the Crimson Tide failed on the big stage rather than excuses. What he knows most of all, is at some point last season, his ‘Process’ broke down.

Writing for the Tampa Bay Times, Matt Baker does a good job describing what happened with the ‘Process.’

"It’s an all-consuming, complicated machine. When it works, it’s unstoppable, like when the Tide became the first team in the modern era to win its first 12 games by at least 20 points each.But if one of the machine’s hundreds of moving parts fails, The Process doesn’t work. And somewhere during the back half of 2018, one — or several — of the parts broke down."

Most Alabama football fans believe more than one or two of those hundreds of moving parts failed. Saban is almost certainly correct that some assistants drifted from full attention on their Crimson Tide players. It is axiomatic, when coaches lose focus, many of their players do as well.

Whether mostly caused by injury-depletion or not, the Crimson Tide roster had weaknesses. At two or three spots, those weaknesses are better described as ‘holes’ in the roster.

Days after the game, Saban said he has seen the signs weeks before that cool night in California. It is not a stretch to say the Clemson staff also saw those signs in advance. While the game’s outcome shocked Alabama football fans, we should not have ignored glimpses of flaws during the season.

When fall camp starts in a few days, the task at hand will be to use whatever reasons Nick Saban has found for the loss – and move on. Go back to focusing on Alabama football being the best it can be. And as Tua suggests, never look at a scoreboard until the end of a contest next January.