It's a critical game for Alabama football tomorrow afternoon in Tuscaloosa against Missouri. It's win and live to play another day time as the Crimson Tide can not afford another loss or its College Football Playoff hopes will be over.
It's put up or shut up time in Tuscaloosa. Talk has come easy for this Crimson Tide team. They typically say the right things about practice habits, focus, and playing to a standard. It's been the lack of seeing that on the field that has irked Alabama fans.
Backup right tackle Wilkin Formby got in on the talk this week when being interviewed by the Crimson Tide Sports Network.
"I think that most importantly, we're just gonna show -- I feel bad for Mizzou," Formby said. "Because we've come off a loss, and we're very focused on us. It's all about us. We're focused on just keep winning. It's the next game. We're focused on the next game at hand. Just being able to dominate our opponent, and more so focus on us and what we have to do."
Providing bulletin board material for an opponent is not a strategy I would employ. And it's certainly comments that wouldn't have gotten out during the previous regime in Tuscaloosa. If it did, it would only have happened once.
At the core, I kind of like Formby's comments. It shows confidence and it's the right mentality. But talk is cheap, and there's been too much talk and not enough action for Alabama so far this season.
We heard the talk in the offseason of getting back to a standard. We heard the talk after the loss to Vanderbilt that the South Carolina game would be the game Alabama showed who it really was. And perhaps, it was, just not in the way players and fans hoped.
Alabama has looked like the same team every game since halftime against Georgia. They blew the big lead and played poorly in three consecutive games, going 1-2 and narrowly avoiding losing to the Gamecocks to make it an 0-3 streak.
At this point, fans no longer want to hear the talk. Keep that talk behind closed doors and let your play on the field do the talking publicly.