Jesse Williams has two rules when he meets with the local media after practice:
1) Don’t ask about his tattoos.
2) Don’t ask about Australia.
He’s heard the questions more times than he can count, and there’s plenty of more relevant ground to cover in an interview. Even so, catch the Aussie in a good mood, and he’ll share a story or two about his ink.
“I stopped checking for the monster under the bed when I realized the monster is me,” he said about one on his right hand.
Most days, though, Alabama’s hulking nose guard would rather talk about his transition from end to center, how he loves the challenge of lining up across from Barrett Jones at practice, or how he’s taken some of the other young linemen under his wing.
He’s also pretty proud of bench-pressing 600 pounds this summer, which lit up Twitter when pictures of the feat spread like wildfire. He thinks he can lift more, but the coaches cut him off.
But there’s one topic that just about everyone on Alabama’s defense is tired of hearing about — comparisons to 2010, when the Tide lost three games coming off of a national championship season. Most of that blame was placed on a young defense, which regressed in almost every statistical category from the suffocating 2009 unit and gave up an uncanny number of big plays. It made Stephen Garcia look like a future first-round draft pick and was torched in the second half of the Iron Bowl collapse.
Yes, the echoes of 2010 ring loud and clear as Alabama gears up for another post-national championship season, but players and coaches swear it won’t be the same this time around. They swear there isn’t the same level of complacency that there was in 2010, when some players were still basking in the reflected light off of that crystal trophy rather than thinking about the season ahead.
“Probably the best summer we’ve had since I’ve been here,” said linebacker Nico Johnson, who’s been around for the 2009 championship, the 2010 meltdown and the return to the top in 2011.
“[I’ve] really been pleased with the team chemistry and the attitude with this group of players that we have,” head coach Nick Saban said. “We had a very good summer.”
They’ll be tested right away in 2012, facing a Michigan team that lit up Big Ten defenses to the tune of 431 yards per game. Its field general is back in quarterback Denard Robinson, the electric quarterback who can beat defenses in innumerable, unexpected ways. He is the only NCAA quarterback to record 1,500 passing yards and rushing yards in a season. There, they call him “Shoelaces,” mostly because he hasn’t tied his shoes since he was ten, but that’s also about the only way to bring him down. Robinson will represent the first litmus test of whether Alabama’s defense will look like the champions that played in 2009 and 2011, or the 2010 team that fell to three opponents in the wake of an undefeated season.
“Reload, not rebuild” is the popular cliché, but if there was one team that oft-repeated phrase applies to, it’s Alabama, who has hoarded talent unlike any other team in the nation. For Saban, the process — to use another popular term around these parts — of preparing the Tide’s defense for a 2012 curtain call, rather than a let down, began long before the dog days of Tuscaloosa’s scorching summer.
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Linebacker Trey DePriest might be the prototypical Nick Saban recruit, if there is such a thing.
At 6 feet 2 inches and 232 pounds, he fits the mold for Saban’s oversized linebackers. DePriest comes from Springfield, Ohio, where he gathered countless awards and more stars than a small galaxy playing on both sides of the ball in high school.
He chose Alabama over a host of other schools from across the country and has found a nice niche in Tuscaloosa, which is exactly what Saban wants from his players — do your job and the rest will fall into place.
Now a sophomore, he’s expected to play inside linebacker in the Tide’s base 3-4 defense. He excelled on special teams — a proving ground for young players — as a freshman during Alabama’s championship run. During the spring and fall, he’s been at the top of the stat sheet for most of Alabama’s scrimmages. And he’ll be counted on to fill the void left by Dont’a Hightower, a first-round pick by the New England Patriots and signal caller on last year’s defense.
“He’s always willing to do whatever it takes to better the team,” senior linebacker Nico Johnson said. “He’s always doing extra reps. He’s doing something extra. That just motivates me to do something extra, too.”
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Vinnie Sunseri was hardly an afterthought coming out of Northridge High School in Tuscaloosa, but he certainly wasn’t the superstar that most of his fellow signees were, either.
A linebacker out of high school, regarded as a three-star prospect by most publications, Sunseri made the switch to safety when he got to Tuscaloosa and hasn’t missed a beat. He started, like DePriest, by proving his worth on special teams with some highlight-reel hits on returners. He eventually took on a significant role in the secondary as players like Will Lowery and Mark Barron sustained injuries.
Sunseri echoes his teammates’ sentiments about the upcoming season, sounding almost Saban-esque at times with his responses to questions of complacency.
“We’ve already forgotten about New Orleans,” he said. “That’s not in any part of our preparation for this season. We’ve got to prepare. We’ve got to get better. We’ve got to work hard every day.”
It’s not hard to see where the coach-speak comes from, being a coach’s son himself. His dad coached linebackers at Alabama before taking the same job at Tennessee this summer — Sunseri assures us there will be no hard feelings. But he isn’t interested in trying to mirror his dad or even the player he’s trying to replace.
“He’s not Mark Barron; he’s not trying to be Mark Barron,” defensive coordinator Kirby Smart said. “He’s trying to be Vinnie, and he’s done that well.”
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If there was a wildcard on the defense, it may be junior college transfer Deion Belue. The cornerback from Northeast Mississippi Community College via. Tuscumbia, Ala., is usually described with one word: playmaker.
“He was a phenomenal talent out of high school, I can tell you that,” said Aaron Suttles, senior recruiting analyst for TideSports.com. “He was electric with the ball in his hands.”
Belue went the junior college route due to grades, but after getting back on track academically, he is set to play a major role in the secondary much like DeQuan Menzie in, yes, 2010. He enrolled in the spring and made noise right away, grabbing an interception returned for a touchdown in a scrimmage. What remains to be seen, though, is if Belue can grasp Saban’s complicated defense enough to see significant playing time.
To do so, Saban has Belue playing at one position: cornerback. Many defensive backs in Alabama’s system learn multiple positions — safety, corner, money or star, to name a few — so they can easily step in if someone goes down. But with Belue, Saban feels letting him concentrate on one position gives him a better chance to get on the field and showcase his playmaking ability.
“He could be the lynchpin, and they need that,” Suttles said.
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DePriest, Sunseri and Belue won’t be the only new faces on the 2012 defense, but the trio represents a system that’s been in place long before any of them thought about playing in crimson. 2012 will be the first year that every single player on the Tide’s roster was recruited by Saban, meaning there is talent at every position up and down the roster.
“Talent-wise, that’s not an issue,” Suttles said. “They’ve got talent up and down the roster that can fill those spots.”
Unlike 2010, however, many of the new faces have experience in Saban’s defensive system. And if they don’t, they are being groomed to fill a specific role. That combination of talent and experience has Alabama primed for another run to the top. If they can put everything together, the 2012 team will make a name for itself, and the comparisons to 2010 will die down. But if not, the voices will only get louder.
“The older guys who were here, we understand how everything went,” Johnson said. “2010 was pretty much a letdown year, but there were a lot of things that we didn’t do right. We want to correct all those things now and keep moving forward.”
For now, we can only take them at their word, but on Saturday, they’ll line up and face Robinson and Michigan, in college football’s version of a baptism by fire. One way or another, after that crucible, it will it be apparent what kind of defense Alabama wants to be this year.
