I gotta bad feeling about this kicking situation, it's the one thing you can't really coach up. Saban and co. could teach me to be a decent linebacker but kicking is weird, you either got it or you don't.
It sounds like you know some football, but I have to respectfully disagree here, at least to an extent.
There is no question but what Saban has had an effect on the kicking game, and on special teams in general.
I am thinking at the moment of an incident a couple or three years ago in which our punter, Fitzgerald (?), shanked a punt over towards Saban and the sideline (right side on the TV). This was towards the very end of the game. We had pretty well salted away the victory. But Saban threw a big one over this. You could see him giving Fitzgerald what for as he exited the field.
What was that about? It was about Saban's mantra: FINISH. Saban obviously has thought that when he came into the program, Shula's influence had set it up so that the team got lax towards the end of a game.
For that matter, I would go even so far as to say that we won a national championship last year without a full demonstration of putting away a team. I know that we purposely played it conservative in the third quarter, because we were backed up with bad field position. But the point is that all last year, I didn't see us get to the point of putting a good team away and then shutting them down. Maybe I am wrong, but this is what I see as what Saban means about FINISHING. As he said in that 2008 halftime speech at Baton Rouge, "Beat on him until he QUITS." When you don't FINISH, the other guy doesn't QUIT.
Your idea here that the kicking game is somehow divorced from the rest of the game, I think, falls a bit short. As another post-er on here said a day or two ago, the kicking game is VITAL to the overall game effort. It can so set the other team back that they can't get good field position. Therefore, the kicking game is integral and vital, right there along with the offense and defense.
Mike Shula's philosophy about using Leigh Tiffin, when Tiffin was a freshman, was to just let him keep on missing field goals against Tennessee until he made one. The result was that we lost a big Tennessee game we should have won, and the Bama nation finally had had their bate of Mike Shula. That kicking performance, it might be said, sealed Mike Shula's fate and ultimately brought in Nick Saban.
When Saban came in, it looked like he took Leigh Tiffin under his wing. He counselled him to think positively, to let bygones be bygones. Saban milked every bit of ability he could out of Leigh Tiffin, and I wonder if Tiffin STILL has never gotten over the psychological situation of being Van Tiffin's son.
Remember the blocked field goal against LSU in 2008? How Saban was gesturing to Tiffin as they walked up the sideline? He was telling him he needed to get more arch on the kick.
The same was true of the special teams play on the kickoff. In the first part of 2007, that was an Achilles' Heel. Showed up in the Georgia game that year. Saban got on it. It improved.
You say that kicking can't be coached like linebacking, for example, can. Well, both those aspects of the game CAN be coached, because the overall mindset applies to both. You are there to accomplish a task. If you don't do it right, Saban is going to let you know about it.
