If you were in Tuscaloosa on Saturday, you probably attended, or at least heard about, A-Day — Alabama’s annual spring game, essentially a glorified scrimmage. The team (and fans) gets ready for the dog days of summer before football season starts up again. It’s a fun day to celebrate the accomplishments of the team and to experience a little football after a few months without it.
But that’s all it is.
It’s tough to draw any real conclusions from A-Day, football-wise. Yes, there are stats and numbers and awards about how different players did, how each team performed and which players stood out. But those need to be taken with a grain of salt.
Typically, it’s the defense that gets the benefit of the doubt here. With coaches not wanting to show the upcoming season’s opponents too much, the offense usually goes into “vanilla” mode — running basic plays that are meant more to establish chemistry among the new players rather than trick the defense into a big gain.
“Well, you didn’t see anything new, unless you want us to just e-mail Michigan what we’re doing and anything new that we’re doing,” Saban said about the offense on Saturday. A reporter had just asked a question about new offensive coordinator Doug Nussmeier and how much of his new offense we saw. “If I saw anything new out there, I would have been upset.”
And he didn’t. Alabama went with basic offensive formations, and apart from a fumble rooskie and a flea flicker (plays which are better tried out in a spring game than an SEC one), the Tide’s offense was as basic as it comes.
Barrett Jones was asked if he thought the defense cheats a little bit during the spring. After all, they see these same few plays over and over again in practice and can to begin to predict what may happen.
“I’m not going to answer that,” Jones responded, laughing. “No comment.”
He also addressed quarterback AJ McCarron on the subject: “It’s hard to tell. You can only do so much. We ran the same play one time — on one drive — nine times,” he said. “Overall, it was a fun day. I mean, I had fun.”
And McCarron gets it. There are those who chastised him for throwing three interceptions in a spring game, but he understands what was at stake — steak, and that’s about it.
Sure, there were a few plays that McCarron would like to have back, but it’s unfair to judge him based on three throws he made in a practice. If this were a real game with real consequences, McCarron would have thought twice about that deep ball into double coverage to start the game.
And this same line of thinking goes with the defense, too. The White team forced four turnovers, exciting to see from a defense that is in a re-tooling and re-building mode. But again, it needs to be taken with a grain of salt.
Football was back on Saturday — if only for just a few hours. And that is something worth celebrating.
