If you’ve been reading these all year, you know the drill by now. I DVR the games, watch them from The Couch, then watch them at at least twice more later, and then I write this thing up.

Not this game. As soon as this baby was over, I hit the “Delete” button on my DVR. It was an impulse move, but although it may have been somewhat lacking in the requisite respect for BSR, my fellow staffers here, and my audience (if such exists), it’s not a move I have regretted for a single instant. Some things I just won’t subject myself to.

So, perforce, From The Couch will be a bit different this week. For your reading pleasure, we will feature less game analysis and more rambling discursions on why this game happened the way it did, and what it means.

Nevertheless, I won’t leave the analysis cup completely dry. We won’t run down all the positions as per normal, but we’ll go over a few, and we’ll start with the coaches, because the Bama staff did a poor job for this game.

Coaching

To start with, it was no secret that the Tide was going to face a motivational deficit in this game, having just missed in a heroic bid to play for the national championship, and instead getting stuck having to play Utes. Now for all I know the coaches may have pulled out every motivational trick in the books – but if they did, I didn’t hear about it, and whatever they tried sure didn’t work.

The buck stops on Nick Saban’s desk for this one. It may not be fair, but Saban is to blame for the fact that Alabama didn’t show up for the first 10 minutes of this ball game – by which time, it was too late. The head coach and his staff had a clear-cut motivational task to perform, and they didn’t get it done.

While dishing out this well-deserved blame, though, I will note that the football business lacks a coach who can bring his team out fully-loaded for every game. Bear Bryant brought flat teams to bowl games more than once: a good example was the 1972 Cotton Bowl, where Bryant’s Tide, which had just seen its national championship hopes deflated by the Punt Bama Punt debacle, lost 17-13 to a far-inferior Texas squad.

Next, even though Jim McElwain supposedly calls the plays, my tendency is to point at Saban for the atrocious decisions to try a long field goal and then punt twice on 4th and short, all when facing a double-digit deficit late in the game. The only one of those decisions that remotely makes sense was the first punt, and that’s only remotely. Not only do the mathematical odds frown on those moves, but they send a message of passivity to a team in a position that demanded aggression. Saban didn’t seem to recognize that, as time pressure reared its head, Utah was just going to pin its ears back and pass rush harder and harder – something for which we obviously had no solution.

It was shades of Mike Shula vs. Arkansas, circa 2004.

Finally, I’ll look at McElwain for the failure to make offensive adjustments to counter Utah’s blitzes. Granted he was working with a quarterback who was totally incapable of making the kinds of quick reads and quick, accurate deliveries that Utah’s quarterback made so much hay with, but there had to be something other than drop back and look downfield, because that just wasn’t working.

But I won’t leave this subject without doling out the scrap of credit that is due to Nick Saban. Saban is known for his defensive adjustments, and the Tide made some good ones here. After Utah’s disastrous first three possessions led to three quick touchdowns, Bama went to a succession of blitz packages and made several unusual personnel maneuvers on the line and in the backfield. It worked, and if our offense hadn’t been so toothless we would have come back and won despite the terrible start.

Offensive Line Woes

Andre Smith missed two games this year, Tulane and Utah. We had two offensive lineman out for two games this year, Tulane and Utah (when you consider Johnson to have been out for the Utah game, which isn’t far off since he left on our second possession).

Surprise surprise, we had two disastrous OL performances this year, against Tulane and Utah. Whether they were disastrous because we lost our best guy or because David Ross is the only OL substitute we have who is game-ready is anybody’s guess: I tend to go with a mix of the two.

At any rate, the malfeasance of our offensive line should’ve come as no surprise to anyone who watched the Tulane game. Tulane shoved us all over the field – and turned out not to be a very good team. Utah, which is better than Tulane, shoved us around even worse.

The main difference between the two games is that we showed up at the opening kickoff against Tulane and therefore never fell behind and never had to depend on our passing attack.

The scary thing is that, substitute Mike Johnson for Marlon Davis, and the Sugar Bowl OL is the same OL that will open up spring practice. But don’t run too far with those fears.

Everybody who returns will have another year of weight room work under their belts, starting most notably with Tyler Love, Barrett Jones, and John Michael Boswell, for whom it will be the first such year. D.J. Fluker and a passle more big ‘uns will heave into view before we have to show our stuff to Virginia Tech. And whoever it is we put on the field will have the advantage of having spent a lot of practice time together, an advantage that the post-Johnson-injury Sugar Bowl grouping was entirely without.

The Rest of the Team

Other than the offensive line, once the Crimson Tide arrived on the field – which would be about ten minutes into the first quarter – they played pretty well. They were just already too deep into the hole to dig their way out without a functioning offensive line and without the kind of aggressive, flexible coaching they needed.

Kudos to Brian Johnson, who consistently found an open man, found him fast, and put the ball on his hands.

How Good is Utah?

One of the things that irked me the most about this game was that I realized, the instant it was over, that it would spark off another round of media “mid-major” adulation like the overblown hysteria that accompanied Boise State’s squeaker of a win over Oklahoma a couple of years back. And sure enough, even gods of football knowledge like our very own Ell have fallen into the trap.

Listen. Utah is pretty good. We knew that last week. But they’re not as good as a healthy Alabama team, which in turn is not as good as Florida even when playing perhaps its (Alabama’s) best game of the season.

Alabama played against Utah exactly like it played against Tulane, except worse because the Tide came out flat. Bama was lucky to beat Tulane, and the same style of play, plus the flat first quarter, could not beat Utah – although it’s telling to note that Alabama outscored Utah over the last 50 minutes of the game, even without a functioning offensive line.

Beating a short-handed, motivationless Alabama squad does not make Utah a great team. This is the same Utah team that was lucky to beat TCU and Oregon St., that beat New Mexico by 3, Air Force by 7, and Weber St. 37-21.

Here’s an exercise for you. Pull out Utah’s schedule, Florida’s schedule, and Oklahoma’s schedule, and place them all side by side. Chalk up which team was the most impressive each week of the season.

Does Utah get a single pre-Bowl mark? Probably not.

Congratulations to the Utes on their undefeated season and on their solid win over the Tide. If there were a legitimate 8-team playoff, they would’ve earned their way into it. But let’s not get confused here and start thinking Utah could compete for an SEC championship. Georgia – as is, not before all the injuries – would be a good match for them.

On the every-cloud-has-a-silver-lining front, though, this is yet another blow against the craptacular BCS system. May it rot in heck.

How Good is Alabama?

One more disappointing thing about this game is that it took a chainsaw to Alabama’s identity as a lunch-pail team that shows up, punches the clock, and quietly goes about its business week after week. After some early- and mid-season messing around with the likes of Tulane, Kentucky, and Ole Miss, the Tide had earned that reputation with a series of consistent, 60-minute performances.

This game we performed for 50 minutes, and even that 50 minutes was not at our highest level. So scratch that identity. It was a regular-season identity only.

Otherwise, the Tide’s ID survives intact. It was not a great team, but it was a team that put together a certain set of skills well enough to beat most anybody.

It was also a team that was dangerously thin in a couple of key areas, one of which got exposed a couple of times this year.

But it was still a very good team, a traditional smash-mouth Alabama team, and it gave us a lot of good memories throughout what was, all in all, a very good year.

This team ended losing streaks against Auburn and LSU, and it ended a terrible oh-for-November streak against the world. We can remember this season by the four head coaches who lost their jobs within a week of running up against us. In the long run, I believe we will mark this season as the first year of the new era, the one that started after the relatively dark quarter-century – 1983-2007 – that followed for Bama after the passing of the Bear.

The luster of the season will forever be dimmed by the dark spot on the tail end. But make no mistake, this was still an over-achieving group. It was a group that will pass along a work ethic and a sense of commitment to the bunch that makes up next year’s team, and it is a group we should remember when we’re toasting our next national championship some time in the relatively near future.

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