Jumbo Package: Alabama determined to avoid a 2024 repeat at Vanderbilt

Happy Gump Day, everyone. As you already know, Alabama moved up to 3rd in the latest College Football Playoff ranking, and the VFL contingent is even more tilted than they were last week. As Michael Casagrande notes, they just don’t understand the concept of a full resume evaluation.

Four > two.

Even if you reject the committee’s view that Alabama’s win over then-undefeated Mississippi State counts among those four, three is still more than two.

For what it’s worth, Auburn (5-4) would likely be considered Tennessee’s next best win. The Tigers are No. 39 in ESPN’s FPI.

Yet, still mad on Rocky Top.

More bear than cat this time.

What’s funny to this newsman is the fact that the CFP isn’t alone in slotting Alabama over Tennessee.

Try every other major poll, ranking, rating, standing.

Here is some more basic logic for the Vawls:

Losing to Texas is worse than losing to Georgia, and losing to South Carolina is worse than losing to Tennessee.

Besides, only a truly elite team could have possibly beaten Kamario Taylor in Starkville. Don’t y’all remember how great he was? It’s frankly a wonder that Alabama isn’t ranked number one after surviving that kind of talent on his home field.

Even still, plenty of writers are just as mad about Alabama’s lofty ranking.

Yup, Mississippi State is likely the motivating factor for ranking Alabama that high.

Notre Dame won the biggest game of Week 10 and made the largest jump among the top 10, moving from No. 11 to No. 5 after beating previous No. 1 Miami. No team in the history of the CFP Rankings had gone from outside the top 10 into the top five in one week.

But did Notre Dame deserve to be outside the top 10 in the first place?

The committee continues to cling to the new strength-of-conference data that was introduced this season. Nine SEC teams are in the top 25, with seven ranked higher than in this week’s AP poll. None were ranked lower than their spots in the AP poll.

All that truly matters, of course, is taking care of business in Nashville. Kalen DeBoer and Kane Wommack certainly remember the last trip to Vandy.

“A lot of these guys don’t have the memory from a couple years ago. Big win, then going up to Vanderbilt,” DeBoer said. “For some of them, it doesn’t matter.”

On Monday, DeBoer was asked how he was using that game to prep the Tide.

“There’s coaches, there’s players that were here. There’s a lot of coaches and players that weren’t here,” DeBoer said. “And so, everyone kind of has their own kind of way they look at each game.

“And obviously, my job as the head coach is to take those experiences — the good, the bad, the ugly — to always apply them and make sure that we’re better because of it. And so, that’s what we’ll do, whether it was last year playing and understanding how Vanderbilt’s style matches up in our matchup versus them.”

A reminder sits in his office two years later: a simple “game block” with the Vanderbilt logo that represents 40 points, 418 yards and 26 first downs allowed, that represents 12 first downs on 18 third-down tries, that represents 5.6 yards per play where the Commodores seamlessly barreled through a Crimson Tide defense left speechless.

That “game block,” Wommack said, is a tangible example of adversity. It’s a reminder of how Alabama was made better and how it continues to develop.

“That game obviously had a major impact on on me, and and I’ve held that,” Wommack said. “I still have that block in our office as mainly just a reminder of how relentless you have to be in your process.”

There is little about this year’s Vandy squad that resembles that 2024 team, but Alabama needs to be at its best regardless.

Dijon Lee spoke about how he’s pushing through and what Ha Ha Clinton-Dix has meant to him.

Then Ha Ha Clinton-Dix, a director of player development, also took a minute to instruct Lee, too.

“He really taught me a lot,” Lee said of the former Alabama safety. “Keep my composure. At the end of the day, it is what it is, you did what you did, but you can’t go back to it. Learn from your mistakes is pretty much what he’s been telling me.”

Lee has been inconsistent in coverage, too. He’s allowed completions on 77.8% of his targets, per PFF. That’s lower than Morgan (78.1%), but it’s higher than Keon Sabb (68.8%), Carmelo O’Neal (68.8%), Bray Hubbard (60%), Zabien Brown (60%), Ivan Taylor (50%) and Chuck McDonald (44.4%).

The coaching points to him: “Let it go.”

“At the end of the day, stuff is going to happen,” Lee said. “It’s football. It’s bound to happen. Move onto the next play. Whatever happened last play was last play. You can’t go back to it. That’s how I felt.”

Lee said in coverage, he has been focusing on improving learning how to locate the ball and “playing through the hands.”

Last, count Chase Goodbread among those ready to see the SEC Championship Game die.

DeBoer went on to say he’d like to play in what will be the last SEC title game next month, and that winning the league is a program goal. But in alluding to the experience of playing the extra game ahead of the CFP last year, he clearly hasn’t forgotten how beaten up the Crimson Tide was entering a blowout loss to Georgia in Atlanta. Between players unavailable with injuries and others who were medically cleared but not at their best, UA was less of a team in the SEC title game than it was 13 days later when it beat Oklahoma in the CFP.
LSU coach Lane Kiffin, as he often does, has said the quiet part out loud.

“I’ve talked to other coaches,” Kiffin said of the SECCG in 2024. “So I’ll just kind of give you the feeling from some other coaches, and that’s they don’t want to be in it.”

All of those who insist on keeping this game seem to forget its role in starting the snowball downhill. This game was the sole reason for South Carolina and Arkansas to be invited into the conference, as 12 teams were required per NCAA rules in order to have divisions and a title game, making it the first conference expansion money grab. There were certainly a few good games in there but most were duds, and if you ever attended the game you know that is was a relatively sterile, over-corporatized event that felt nothing like college football.

And, it simply doesn’t fit the current playoff model with 16 team leagues. Good riddance, indeed.

That’s about it for now. Have a great day.

Roll Tide.