I'm not trying to throw cold water on expectations, but Alabama will only win as many games as its defense will allow it to, and that will depend on how quickly we can integrate current players into the new scheme. UA will also be depending greatly on freshmen.
People have tried to say, "Oh, the new defense isn't that much different than the old one," when in actuality it couldn't get any more different if it tried. There isn't a single position on the field that is being taught the same way or that will have the same responsibilities. Zero. Not a single one.
If the defense jels quickly in the fall, the offense has enough talent to make some very good teams nervous. But putting on the darkest pair of crimson glasses I could find after A-Day, I could only make myself cautiously optimistic. Some of what I saw was just plain scary.
There are three or four key positions in this defense where we have zero or one available player who went through spring training -- nose tackle (Motley), left inside LB (Mustin), Jack/left outside linebacker (Knight) and free corner (M.Johnson; Castille, I feel, will end up on the boundary). Most contenders -- not teams, *contenders* -- have two or three people at each position.
Prince Hall also has to get accustomed to being a field signal-caller; we haven't had one of those in four years. Hall is a sophomore and is not yet a complete player by any stretch.
Of the problem spots, I think McClain will start ahead of Mustin, Motley will essentially split NT with two true freshmen (Chapman and McCullough), while Knight and Johnson will hold onto their spots.
This has not yet addressed our weakness at safety, where Marcus Carter has been little more than a placeholder for two years and Rashad Johnson isn't yet a complete safety. If Ricks qualifies, he'll almost certainly displace one of those guys, most likely Carter.
Therefore, you're talking about significant trouble at six of the 11 defensive positions, and we haven't even yet talked about how Keith Saunders, who ran close to a 5.0 forty at junior Pro Day last month, is going to handle OLB. The only thing that keeps me from listing that as a real trouble spot is because we have some depth there that looked OK in the spring (Waldrop, Higgenbotham).
Saban's first season at LSU was very rough around the edges, and I expect his first season here to be the same. Without trying to get too particular about which games are wins and which aren't -- because I'll bet we have one loss somewhere that no one is expecting, maybe an Ole Miss or a Vanderbilt -- I'd say 8-4 is the center of the bell curve, and it could be anywhere from 5-7 on the low side to 9-3 on the high side.
