Alabama Football: Preseason defensive prediction for the Crimson Tide

Over the next month, Bama Hammer will offer a number of predictions for the 2022 Alabama football season. They will not be presented as ‘bold’ predictions where some stretching of the possible is often done to achieve boldness.

The intent is for every prediction to focus on a performance element critical to Crimson Tide success.

Alabama Football Defensive Interceptions

If the purpose of this post was boldness, the prediction would be the 2022 defense will set an Alabama football record for interceptions in a season.

The current Crimson Tide record is 25, set in the 1979 season. By comparison, the 2021 Crimson Tide defense had 15 interceptions. Making the 1979 record so remarkable is that, in total, the Tide defense had only 218 opportunities to intercept a pass. Showing how much college football has changed since the 1970s, last season Tide opponents threw a total of 471 passes.

Perhaps more impressive than the interception total in 1979 are two more team stats from 1979. Alabama played in only 12 games in 1979 during which opponents completed only 35.8% of their pass attempts.

Fourteen Alabama defenders intercepted passes in 1979, led by Tommy Wilcox and Ricky Tucker who had four picks each.

No. 2 in the Alabama Record Book for season interceptions is the 2009 team. Opponents threw 449 passes against the Tide and 24 were intercepted. The 2009 team played in 14 games.

As every Alabama football knows 1979 and 2009 were National Championship seasons. As the 2020 Crimson Tide showed, National Championships can be won without a slew of interceptions. There were only 11 in that 13-game, 2020 season. An interception may or may not provide better field position than a ‘3-and-out’ but snatching an INT works on the psyche of the opposing quarterback far more than a standard change of possession.

2020 Alabama Football Interception Prediction

The prediction is the Crimson Tide will pick off 22 passes in the 2022 season. That is a big bump up from 15, but there are several reasons why the prediction makes sense. Three of those reasons are Will Anderson Jr., Dallas Turner and Chris Braswell. Pete Golding and Nick Saban will at times have all three on the field. Even when the number is two, the quarterback pressure will be relentless. With all three, no opposing offensive line will be capable of slowing them.

There are actually seven more reasons. As was discussed in an earlier post, the Tide secondary is so loaded, using a Quarter package is more than possible, at times it might be the perfect defense. That is because at least seven members of the Crimson Tide secondary are capable of making game-changing plays, The main seven are Eli Ricks, Jordan Battle, Kool-Aid McKinstry, Khyree Jackson, Brian Branch, DeMarcco Hellams and Malachi Moore.

Don’t forget, as a freshman, Moore led the team with three interceptions for the season.

Note: Team interception stats in this post are from rolltide.com.

Closer to week one of the season, we’ll make some bold predictions. One is likely to be the 22 interceptions number is too low and the Tide will surpass the 1979 total and reach 26 interceptions.