The list of things Alabama has needed in 2024 to win games – winning the turnover battle, getting the “good” Jalen Milroe, establishing a run threat, avoiding injuries – has been a long one.
Against Oklahoma, Alabama got none of the above.
Alabama lost the turnover battle 3-to-1. Jalen Milroe finished the game 11-of-26 for 164 yards and 3 picks, and only netted 7 yards on 15 carries. Alabama got decent running from its running backs, but clearly tried (and failed) to establish the same QB run game that had won the day in Baton Rouge and against Missouri. It lost its defensive signal-caller early in the game, LB Deontae Lawson, and never plugged the resulting hole. If anyone is surprised by the result given the totality of the forces working against the Crimson Tide in this one, there’s no way to effectively communicate it.
It didn’t help that Alabama was completely ruined by multiple missed officiating calls in critical situations. We’ll get to that later, as part of a larger discussion of college football’s attitude toward officiating training and pay, as well as accountability.
As far as this game goes, there’s no way to really gauge just how far back it set the college football world. Oklahoma threw for fewer than 100 yards but still found a way to run for more than 250. This was Vanderbilt on steroids, with Oklahoma basically falling forward for four yards over and over again, and letting Alabama shoot itself in the foot. But make no mistake: The game turned on the absolute dominance of the Oklahoma front seven (because OU did spend quite a bit of time in a 4-3 look) against Alabama’s offensive line, which had no answer.
Alabama came with the wrong plan, didn’t execute that plan very well, didn’t adjust quickly enough to their own struggles, and then somehow had no answer for how to stop a team that came into this game with basically an all-freshman wideout corps and a quarterback who can’t make a throw of significance beyond the first-down sticks.
In short, there was plenty of blame to go around, and in this case, it finally proved lethal to Alabama’s title hopes. But if we’re being honest, after watching how Alabama has performed on the road this season, it’s hard to imagine how this particular team was a real title contender in the first place.
Things will change, and they will get better. A team in transition will ultimately no longer be, and – paraphrasing the late Harry Caray here – sure as God made little green apples, Alabama will be back in the playoffs. It just won’t happen this year, at least not barring some kind of cosmic lunacy on the final weekend of the season the likes of which no one has ever seen.
Road games in the SEC are tough, which Kalen DeBoer is finding out firsthand in his initial season in Tuscaloosa. Alabama went 1-3 on the road this year, losing to two teams it probably should have beaten handily (Vanderbilt, Oklahoma) and to a Tennessee team in a game where Alabama squandered multiple opportunities. Only one game now matters, and it matters more than DeBoer might initially know. Lose next week at home to Auburn, in the same season that Alabama lost on the road to Tennessee, and DeBoer’s first offseason isn’t going to be anything he’ll want to remember for very long.
As Texas A&M can attest, Auburn is a tough out. Alabama, for the first time in a long time – probably dating back to 2010 – has a one-game season in front of it with a very specific goal: beat its chief rival. A performance like the one Alabama put on tape tonight will not be good enough to do it.
Here’s the Five-Point Breakdown for Alabama-Oklahoma:
1. Figuring out which was worse – Milroe, or the gameplan – is a question on par with solving for the next digit of Pi. Alabama appeared to simply copy and paste the Missouri and LSU gameplans onto this game. The fallacies of doing so were myriad. First, this was a game against what might be the best front seven in the SEC. LSU had perhaps two players in its entire defensive two-deep that could get in the rotation at Oklahoma, and it should have been clear to anyone with access to videotape. Second, this was on the road, as Missouri was not, and Alabama didn’t knock out the Oklahoma quarterback in the first few series of the game. Third, the Missouri and LSU gameplans only worked because Alabama got solid play from Jalen Milroe at quarterback. That didn’t happen this time, to say the least. Milroe’s first two interceptions were terrible misreads on his part; the third, at least, could be blamed on poor OL play. Capping it all off was a stunning resistance to modify the plan as it went along. Oklahoma’s weakness was its secondary; where were the plays that would pressure OU’s corners and defensive alignment, rather than hoping to win one-on-one matchups against safeties and linebackers? Why did Alabama ever run the ball when Oklahoma went to its big lineup up front and stacked the box with seven or eight defenders? Early drops from C.J. Dippre and Ryan Williams aside, Alabama got itself boxed in early with a plan that wasn’t going to work, and once Milroe got flustered, we saw the Milroe of two years ago. Total systemic breakdown here, and to some extent, this has to be fixed in a week’s time or it could happen again.
2. OL had a tough assignment, but the struggles of the OTs went beyond what was expected. Elijah Pritchett will never want to watch this tape again, because Oklahoma’s defensive ends lived in Milroe’s face for much of the night and it was in large part due to Pritchett and, to a somewhat lesser extent, Kadyn Proctor. The entire line struggled, really; the guards and center couldn’t solve the riddle of Oklahoma’s defensive tackle rotation, but the play of Proctor and Pritchett was grade-F level. Milroe’s third interception was directly the fault of a blown block that allowed an OU rusher to get to Milroe inside of two seconds of the snap. The QB run game failed in large part because guards either couldn’t pull fast enough to lock up the backside, or couldn’t move a tackle out of the way on an inside lane. Some of Bama’s best run blocking actually came with Geno VanDeMark in the game for Jaeden Roberts, but none of it was good enough to allow Alabama to do what it wanted to so. Refer back to in-game adjustments in point No. 1, but the other principal difference between this game and the Missouri and LSU games was an offensive line that couldn’t get out of its own way, much less move Oklahoma out of the way, either.
3. Run defense suffered with Lawson out, but it wasn’t great to begin with due to DL issues. Almost as big a failing as the offensive line had trying to stop the Oklahoma DL, Alabama’s defensive line – which we previewed to have a sizable advantage over Oklahoma’s OL due to injuries – was a no-show. Alabama’s tackles couldn’t get penetration, couldn’t move the line of scrimmage backward, and couldn’t get off their blocks to pursue. The loss of LB Deontae Lawson, however, was a killer in its own right. It forced Justin Jefferson into the game as his replacement, and Jefferson – while highly effective in 2024 as a package linebacker, primarily against passing teams – proved to be hampered by his smaller size. Alabama’s run fits immediately took a hit and too many times, Jefferson was seen riding a running back heading upfield rather than toward the backfield. Alabama also chose to stay in nickel personnel too often, somewhat of a callback to the Tennessee loss; however, with Lawson out and Jefferson in the game, Alabama didn’t really have any other ILBs it could bring onto the field to give the 4-3 look that it uses at times. Neither Justin Okoronkwo nor Jeremiah Alexander have played enough with the game on the line this year, and Cayden Jones, who appears to be the next man up, missed several games in the middle of the season with an injury. Alabama tried to add beef by going with double Bandits a few times – L.T. Overton and Jah-Marien Latham on the field together – but it didn’t take. The big question at the moment is the injury status of Lawson, and apparently Jefferson as well, who may have tweaked a hamstring. Going into the Auburn game with a green linebacking corps isn’t what Alabama needs.
4. Special teams misfires just added to the misery. Ryan Williams on a punt return, for one, but Alabama also nearly lost the ball on a punt exchange when Emmanuel Henderson Jr. got hit by the ball. Of greater concern was the early work of James Burnip, who struggled against Mercer and again in this game – but who, to be fair, did bounce back later in the game with a long punt Alabama downed at the 2-yard line. A short punt set up Oklahoma on its first touchdown drive and it ended up being yet another signal of a bad night for Alabama.
5. Officiating probably didn’t cost Alabama the game, but Alabama was victimized by at least two killer calls. The most obvious one was the touchdown to Ryan Williams. It was an all-timer of a bad call, but that’s not the real issue here. The issue seems to be that the official in question – linesman Chad Lorance in this case – didn’t seem to actually know the rule. Either that, or he actually got Ryan Williams confused with Germie Bernard after the snap, but even that doesn’t make sense in this case because Bernard didn’t commit an infraction, either. The other call was more common, a missed defensive pass interference against Bernard on a play that would have extended a drive had it been flagged; instead, Alabama was forced to give the ball to Oklahoma. Put two touchdowns on the board for Alabama and maybe we’re having a different discussion right now.
The larger issue here is one of accountability. There is none in college football officiating at the moment. We’ve all heard the stories about how college football officials are part-timers – they’re the financial advisors, realtors, government clerks, etc., who do this job for the love of the game. But they’re not above legitimate criticism, and they’re not above the sport demanding that they actually know the job they sign up to do.
It is somewhat mind-blowing, in this age of billions upon billions of dollars being spent on college football, that the NCAA can’t be bothered to make professionals out of the people charged with actually calling the games, at least at the FBS level. The stakes are too high now, not that they were ever really lower to the fans and players, but with each passing billion-dollar TV deal, the cost of paying a higher wage for officials – and then demanding more training from them – looks more insignificant.
We’ve also been told that it’s getting harder to recruit officials, and that the speed of the game means that applicants who aren’t in top physical condition are being rejected. To us, that is just noise in the line, and it could be quieted a good deal by giving people enough financial incentive to meet whatever the standards of the day are. There are others who say prospective officials don’t want the scrutiny that comes with a bad call; our response to that is no one is forcing them to put themselves out there in the first place.
If you’re going to do a job, do it right. This crew didn’t, and there’s nothing the SEC or the NCAA can do after the fact to make Alabama feel better. They can only say “sorry, we hope it doesn’t happen the next time,” because that’s all they ever do anyway.
For the SEC to hire eight full crews of officials making $80,000 per year for each official would cost $5,120,000 per season. That’s couch-cushion change for this league. It’s past time to demand the same attention to detail from officials that we demand of players and coaches.
Follow Jess Nicholas on X at @TideFansJessN