Well, this goes back to the oldest complaint I have about Nick Saban, and it's also one of Dabo Swinney's greatest strengths: Playing more players (or in Saban's case, not enough).
It's especially problematic on defense. Except in three cases (Diggs' season-ending injury, S.Smith's injury Monday night, and Jared Mayden's targeting suspension against UGA), Bama played six DBs in close games the entire year, with the exception of Diggs' injury that brought Mayden into the weekly plan, and the minor exception that Daniel Wright was originally getting the snaps in dollar that went to Mayden until Wright hurt his foot. Once Wright got hurt, we never ran another seven-DB coverage the whole year and/or subbed out one of the regular DBs. Up front, we played seven DL for the first month and then stopped playing Musika. At linebacker, McMillon got a handful of snaps in non-blowouts (like less than 10) but no one else played when games were close. Saban has always put together playing rotations like he was still in Miami with a 53-man roster limit.
On offense, we rotated a lot at RB but elsewhere, there was almost no rotation at all. Lester Cotton/Deonte Brown was the only spot that saw on-field competition. Miller Forristall worked in some packages at TE. At wide receiver? We played four guys. Every time I bring that up someone asks "which one of our four studs do you want to sit" but that's not how it works. You have to give guys a blow every now and then or they're just going to run out of gas. We occasionally let Tyrell Shavers or Derek Kief into the game, and by "occasionally" I mean with the same frequency as Halley's Comet. Kief should have played a lot more this year; he had height, he could block and he was a popular fifth-year senior who could catch.
I agree that Anoma should have gotten more rabbit snaps this year, and our handling of Parks/Latu might encourage one of them to seek a transfer. None of those guys were realistic options at ILB, though, where Alabama had more pertinent struggles. We really needed to give Benton, Kaho and Moody more chances. The fact we were still playing starters late in games where we had 20- or 30-point leads was sort of ridiculous.
However, I have learned that this isn't going to change, because that's a leopard-and-its-spots issue for Saban.