I'm just now entering the thread and haven't tried to read all the background, but, IMO, this started a couple of years ago. I think Saban made a crucial mistake in recruiting. He made a decision that the game was going to return to heavy running and this turned out to be wrong. We are saddled with overweight, unagile OLs. We have a 370 lb LT who takes two seconds to move 4' to the left. Our OL is porous to fast. agile DL and LBs, not to mention blitzing DBs. It may take a cycle or two of recruiting to correct the error...