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Alabama offensive coordinator Kirby Smart sat down with 680 The Fan on Monday and discussed the Crimson Tide's loss to the Ohio State Buckeyes in the first-ever College Football Playoff. The Buckeyes defeated Alabama by a score of 42-35, and Smart attributed Ohio State's quarterback situation as one of the main reason the Crimson Tide defense struggled.
“I’ve coached about 15 years – it was the most different situation we’ve ever had because of the quarterback situation,” Smart said. “So you’ve got one quarterback on tape (Braxton Miller), then you’ve got another quarterback on tape (J.T. Barrett), then you’ve got one game on the quarterback (Cardale Jones). And looking back, we have exit interviews with our players, and when you look in hindsight, I asked every kid, Landon Collins, Nick Perry, Jarrick Williams, the really smart seniors on our team, I said ‘Where did we go wrong? What did we do wrong?’
“All three of them said they did not respect the quarterback, and our job as the coaches was to make them respect the quarterback. Well they heard from the media, they heard from ESPN, they heard from everybody that he was a third-string quarterback. How can a third-string quarterback beat Alabama? We didn’t promote him enough and they didn’t value his talents enough, and he came in – we thought he was a really good passer, well he ran the ball well, too. We had not seen him run the ball – and not a runner like Blake (Sims) and not a runner like their other guy, just big.
“This guy was just lumbering and big and ran through arm tackles, even on our big, physical defense.”