Practice Report: Alabama Practices with Wet Footballs in Preparation for Rainy Weather at Ole Miss
TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Alabama football conducted its third practice of the week on Wednesday afternoon, practicing with wet footballs to simulate rain in preparation for the potential bad weather due to Hurricane Delta.
Alabama's offense has been quite successful over the past couple of weeks, tallying 958 yards and 90 points against Missouri and Texas A&M. It is definitely a new era for the Crimson Tide as it has for the last few seasons with a dynamic offense becoming more and more prevalent among the program and the defense taking the backseat.
Earlier in the day on Wednesday during the SEC's weekly coaches teleconference, Alabama coach Nick Saban detailed how he believes that the Crimson Tide wasn't the first school in the conference to embrace the offensive side of the game.
"I think that actually some other schools in the SEC did it before us," Saban said. "Ole Miss actually had this kind of offense, which is what we struggled against, and they scored a lot of points against us and actually beat us a few times. That's what sort of made us start thinking about, hey, we're not taking advantage of the rules in college football if we don't throw RPOs and do some of the things that other people are doing.
"You'd have to ask everybody else because I don't really know why they started to do what they did. I can only tell you why we started to do what we did."
Leading the charge on the Crimson Tide's offense has been redshirt-junior quarterback Mac Jones, who passed for 249 and 435 yards against Missouri and Texas A&M, respectively. Jones also possessed a quarterback rating of 189.7 and 250.9 in each contest.
Saban also discussed the key traits that quarterback Mac Jones and other signal callers need to exemplify to succeed in a tough 10-game, conference-only season.
"I know there's year to year change, but most of the time the change is in terminology," Saban said. "And there's only so many pass routes that you're going to run, there's only so many running plays that you can run. I think there is some carryover, but I do think that when you go fast for an offense, then the defense has to declare itself, that maybe the learning curve for the quarterback is not quite as difficult, because he can read one thing more often than trying to drop back and read the whole coverage and go through a progression of 1-2-3.
"So I can't speak to how this has worked. All I know is this guy is playing really, really well in this system. And we have a tremendous amount of respect for their offense and what Lane has done there relative to the short period of time that he's been there."
