To borrow heavily from Andy Griffith, it was football, but what it wasn’t, was A-Day.
Alabama concluded spring practice Saturday with what amounted to an exhibition practice. Of the 90 minutes of practice time, about 10 was spent in some form of scrimmage work – or, as we have come to call it over most of a millennium, A-Day. The rest was more or less C-Minus-Day if you came to Tuscaloosa expecting to get any insight that could be applied to the upcoming season.
Between missing a dozen or more players due to injury and a stated desire to keep system-related information under wraps, Kalen DeBoer and staff chose not to have the traditional scrimmage-for-a-steak-dinner format and instead treated a small crowd – 5,000 fans at the most, we’d say – to a 19-period practice full of mostly drills.
There were a few things that stood out, though, because coaches can’t hide everything. The punting job, for instance, is wide open. True freshman Alex Asparuhov has been absent from practice with a leg injury; he was on the sideline today with no obvious brace. Transfer Blake Doud and redshirt freshman walk-on Anderson Green, who was James Burnip’s backup in 2024, took turns reminding people that neither of them is Burnip. Doud, who was kicking for the Colorado School of Mines last year, appears to have the edge there.
Placekickers Conor Talty and Reid Schuback both made all of their kicks, and the ball seems to get off Talty’s foot a lot faster this year than it did in 2024. Alabama should be fine there.
Beyond that, there wasn’t much to tell. At quarterback, Ty Simpson appears to have separated himself from Austin Mack and Keelon Russell, but all three are still in the fight for the job. Mack started the day slowly, hesitant on his throws, before heating up late. Russell’s first pass in scrimmage work was intercepted, but it is easy to see why he was so coveted. He is one of the most mechanically impressive quarterbacks Bama has had lately.
At running back, Jam Miller had a nice afternoon but there wasn’t a lot shown by backups Dre’lyn Washington, Richard Young and Kevin Riley. For that matter, some of the most memorable work of the day was turned in by a walk-on, Michael Lorino, who appeared to get enough work to at least be considered in the mix for some kind of special teams role.
The much more important questions to most Bama fans were the two lines of scrimmage, though, and here’s where the day’s format really fell flat. The first unit appeared to be Wilkin Formby and Olaus Alinen at the tackles (with Alinen in particular looking adept at pulling as a run blocker), Parker Brailsford at center, and Kam Dewberry and Jaeden Roberts at the guard spots. The second unit had so much much switching in and out going on that only one position (Joe Ionata, as backup center) appeared to have been claimed. As for the defensive line, Tim Keenan and Edric Hill got most of the work inside, but with practice either set to “Thud” or “Touch” most of the time – no tackling allowed – the defense couldn’t really show its wares.
The one position that jumped off the page in a negative way was tight end, due to injuries. Danny Lewis Jr., Josh Cuevas and Marshall Pritchett are all sidelined. That made Jay Lindsey – who himself had missed practice time in recent weeks – the lone true Y-tight end on the roster. Lindsey appeared to function well enough as a blocker but doesn’t yet look like a natural receiver. Weber State transfer Peter Knudson caught everything thrown his way but probably isn’t big enough for Y and doesn’t have elite quickness. Fans saw very little of Jayden Hobson or Peyton Fox; for that matter, Alabama used backup guard Will Sanders as a tight end more than it did either Hobson or Fox. Most observers expect Bama will go back to the portal for tight end help.
This kind of postmortem reads like a typical A-Day wrap-up, but what was lacking on Saturday was the feel of a traditional A-Day. Steve Taylor, an 80s/90s alternative artist, once wrote a song called “This Disco Used to Be a Cute Cathedral,” and that was sort of how things felt: things have changed, and not necessarily for the better.
The presence of even just a couple thousand fans was enough to appear to trigger some nervousness in some players (most notably QB Austin Mack, early on) and A-Day’s greatest benefit over the years was that it gave a lot of younger and lesser experienced players some real live-fire scenarios to have to navigate. For many players, those A-Day experiences helped prepare them to play in front of larger, more hostile crowds later in their careers.
But that is gone, at least for now, and maybe forever. The number of schools hosting any kind of actual scrimmage has fallen precipitously as coaches get more and more paranoid about other schools discovering hidden talent in their rosters and luring those players into transferring. And fans wanting their traditional early peek into the state of the program were more or less told to stay tuned for later.
Follow Jess Nicholas on X at @TideFansJessN