If we had dysfunction last year, it was a team dysfunction. We were somehow less than the sum of our parts, at one time or another, in just about every phase.
Until someone proves otherwise, I'm going with the easiest explanation for that. Transition. Upheaval. Chaos. These are poison to team chemistry.
Blaming all this on one player, who had his stock fall in equal proportion to the rest of the team's, feels like incomplete analysis to put it mildly.
Prior to last season I mentioned that for SEC teams, the general rule is that you lose an extra game per year if you change either your offensive or defensive systems. We changed both.
In my mind, we were about a 10-2 team. With the "system change penalty" we would have been 8-4 in the regular season. We finished the regular season at 9-3, and the Georgia win (which was an upset in the final analysis) was what caused us to come out on the plus side of that.
Having said that, none of the losses were out of reach. We should have beaten Vanderbilt and Michigan. The Tennessee loss was another that felt like we gave it away at the end. The Oklahoma game was DeBoer's Louisiana-Monroe, even though Oklahoma was far better competition. We looked like we simply didn't care.
All of those things are common during changeover years when you're not going from the prior head coach (who was successful upon his exit) to an assistant from his staff. Had we had someone on the final Saban staff that was capable and ready -- time will tell about this, but I think Tommy Rees will be a good head coach one day; he probably wasn't ready for this opportunity right now, though -- we probably could have come out better than 9-4 in the end. But then the question would be whether the new guy was really the answer, or just a way to minimize the transitional damage.
I think Byrne chose the right path. Time will tell if he picked the right specific guy.
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