MSU preview: Tide’s biggest opponent this week? Emotional letdown
Mississippi State is a team in transition in 2013. And unfortunately for the Bulldogs, it’s a transition from contender to bottom-feeder.
The Bulldogs have become, overall, a respectable SEC team under head coach Dan Mullen, but have yet to take the next step up. Mullen has become somewhat notable, not necessarily for his successes, but rather for his struggles against other SEC West opponents. He also heads the program that lost Cam Newton to Auburn in 2010, and in seasons since, the program endured allegations of NCAA rules violations. No SEC program embodies the concept of “almost” quite like Mississippi State.
But the biggest problem Mississippi State faces in the here and now, is that this is a team that continues to lose ground to all six of its SEC West competitors in regards to talent. MSU’s recruiting has always been scattershot, no matter the name on the head coach’s door. And in 2013, the Bulldogs find themselves rebuilding a defense undercut by graduation, and a depth chart that has suffered several key losses due to injury. Questionable handling of the quarterback situation has done Mississippi State no favors, either.
Arkansas preview: Razorbacks in transition, Alabama looking for domination
October 15, 2013 Comments Off
For Alabama fans who appreciate nostalgia, they’ll get plenty of it when Arkansas comes to town this week.
Why? Because they’ll swear Danny Ford was back in Fayetteville.
Bret Bielema took over the Arkansas program this spring after John L. Smith was mercifully let go after a season that could justifiably be called the most disappointing – relative to expectations – in the history of Arkansas football. The Razorbacks were coming off a string of high-scoring seasons under Bob Petrino, and the program was threatening to punch into the elite of the SEC West.
And then Bob Petrino got in a motorcycle accident, got caught lying about an affair and was relieved of his duties as the Razorback head coach. The coach of the Hogs had been thrown off his Hog and was found to have been acting like a pig.
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Reports out of Oxford this week tell the tale of Ole Miss players taking to Twitter to brag about a coming upset, and being a bit loose-lipped in media interviews about their opinions of the 2013 Alabama team, particularly the Crimson Tide’s pass defense.
It doesn’t seem to matter than Alabama’s pass defense has given up natch to any quarterback not nicknamed Johnny Football, or that this is a team coming off consecutive national titles and neither one were by accident. Whatever Ole Miss saw in the Texas A&M tape has certainly gotten the Rebels into a lather, and it will be up to Alabama to do something about it Saturday night. Ole Miss is probably the second-toughest game left on the Tide schedule outside of LSU.
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For once, Alabama seemed to have been graced with a manageable schedule. After years of the Crimson Tide suffering through Roy Kramer-era schedules rife with curious off-week placement, unbalanced off-week rotations with opponents and frequent stacking of contender-quality opposition, the 2013 Tide schedule must have looked like a vacation at first glance.
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Alabama has looked choppy in openers before, including the last time these two teams met in Atlanta. But Alabama is playing a different game than Virginia Tech or approximately 110 other Division-IA programs are in 2013: Alabama is shooting for a national championship, and the product Alabama put on the field Saturday will have to improve by leaps and bounds to avoid being upset along the way. Alabama’s offense looked, quite frankly, inept. Aside from a couple of outstanding individual plays from running back T.J. Yeldon and one long pass play by A.J. McCarron to – who else? – Christion Jones, the Tide offense was badly out of sorts for most of the game.
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Alabama finds itself in the unique and enviable position of two-time defending national champion as the 2013 season starts. While almost every team must replace departed players from one year to the next, the 2013 edition of the Alabama Crimson Tide retains a veteran presence throughout its roster, as well as returning its star quarterback and most of its playmakers on both sides of the ball.
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At least every five years, beloved stars, respected role players and former prospects who didn’t pan out rotate through the system, replaced by signing classes full of 18-year-olds all confident that they’ll be the next big things in town. For the coaches who recruit and later instruct these players, the summer offseason is the primary evaluation period for rising prospects – although, to the chagrin of many, the process really begins much earlier than that.
Here is a first look at Alabama’s recruiting needs and a projection for how many the Crimson Tide will sign as 2013 progresses.
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The Crimson Tide followed up national championship No. 15 last month with another recruiting national championship this month. Alabama signed the top class in the country, just as it did last year, which means for anyone wishing for a Tide backslide, it won’t happen due to a regression in the total talent level anytime soon.
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Alabama has but one win in its history against Notre Dame, and that game – played in the middle of a regular season 20-something years ago against a bad Irish team – was cause for such momentous remembrance that Alabama LB Cornelius Bennett’s career was advanced several notches (and artist Daniel Moore’s career launched) as the result of a vicious sack of Irish QB Steve Beuerlein. For a program that prides itself on not rushing the field after wins or assigning too much importance to individual victories, most Alabama fans who were alive for that game can still tell you exactly where they were at several points in the afternoon.
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Spring games always spur a unique set of questions each year, but Alabama fans in 2012 were probably most wanting to know if the 2012 team is in danger of pulling a repeat of 2010. The answer is, not likely.
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