Re: No: I am NOT a brown nose!
There were calls missed both ways. Go to Tex Ags and there's a thread where a member took a screenshot of about 12 different plays that Alabama should've penalized on and we weren't. I'd rather they officiated like they did rather than call an additional 10 penalties on each team. However many calls they missed on Texas A&M they probably missed just as many on our team. I dislike blaming a teams performance on officiating. There's a plethora of penalties that go uncalled in every game. They could call holding on both teams on just about every play - then there would be complaints to just let them play..
I agree that poor officiating (all too common these days) does NOT excuse poor performance by our team. HAD we played up to our ability, the bad calls would not have mattered. The game would have ended 48-3 or 50-10, and the bad calls would have been just another footnote to another dominant win.
But we Didn't play well, and thus the bad calls clearly DID matter in this game. I went to TexAgs and found the thread, and it sure looks like maybe 8-9 of the claimed "missed calls" could have gone against Alabama. Balance that against un-called Holding on at least half or more of aTm's offensive plays, and frequent PI on their DB's that were never called, etc. and I'd say we still got the short end of the stick.
Just as an aside, reading about "undisclosed injuries" and such - (a staple of the Saban era, in case anyone wasn't aware) - but watching the game I could not help but wonder if there was some kind of "Bug" going through the team. Several players looked like they might have been playing with either a fever or flu symptoms. JK Scott in particular just didn't look like he felt well.
You might laugh at such an observation, but anyone who's raised kids has had the experience of looking at one of your kids and knowing (sometimes before they knew themselves) that "something" was wrong. NOT saying its necessarily the case, but we (and my wife especially) have noticed things like this before - specific players and how they were moving, or their posture on the sidelines, that something was wrong, More than once we've found out later that yes, that player was hurt or sick, even thought the coaches didn't disclose it.
Think it can't happen? Well - some may remember back in the 1990's one of Dubose's teams went to play at Arkansas and had an uncharacteristically TERRIBLE showing (even by Dubose standards) - it came out later that many of the players had eaten tainted food at the team meal that Friday night at the hotel. Half the team had spent all day Saturday puking their guts out and barely able to stand up due to food poisoning.
Sounds like a scene out of the movie "Airplane", yet stuff like that really does happen - the same thing can happen with various types of communicable illnesses - like stomach bugs or head colds - people in close proximity (like riding on buses and airplanes together) can quickly spread a bug to many members of the group.
Just throwing it out there as one possibility.........