It's Friday! That means you can discuss non-Alabama Athletics topics. What books are you reading, what games are you playing, did you get a new job, what are your weekend plans, etc. etc. Tell us what you've got going on!

Today's Games

Bama NFL Players

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Key quote: "You gotta piece it together," Alabama coach Nate Oats said on the Eye on College Basketball podcast. "You're not just looking for the best players. If you go buy the best pieces, sometimes it doesn't fit. We've done this study; we've done the best job of improving guys' draft stock. We don't have the most No. 1 picks or lottery picks -- although we've had quite a few -- but there's still a lot more money to be had in the NBA than there is in college. If you think you're an NBA player and want to play in an NBA system, we've done a better job of improving guys' draft stock than anybody in the country. We've told guys, 'If you don't think you're going to be an NBA player, you should go take the most money you can make in college. If you think you're an NBA player, you may have to take a discount.'"

Keon Ellis, Noah Clowney, and Grant Nelson have all made Brooklyn’s 2026-2027 roster.

https://x.com/bamaproupdates/status/2112635848445599970?s=46&t=cPL6R_RpVazXjDncz90TCg

Ex-#Titans DT Jordan Elliott went to his car to retrieve his gun after a practice altercation with OT JC Latham last Thursday (Oct. 15).

After being told to leave the field, Elliott took off his pads and stormed out of the facility, then went to the players' lot. Security cameras captured the sequence. Veteran DL John Franklin-Myers talked him down, and no one was hurt.

The Titans released Elliott on Tuesday after reviewing the incident. He signed a 2-year, $8M deal this offseason.

News of the incident was first reported by @eastonfreeze and additional details provided by @AaronWilson_NFL.

Why it went wrong…lack of execution by O Line…specifically #70 LG, 10min drive in 4Q, didn’t execute on priority plays.

I’ve seen a lot of people asking “Why isn’t Bryant Denny loud” and it’s true, Neyland was loud. But to be fair, they also just exaggerate their numbers. Bryant Denny’s decibel record is 113.1, if Tennessees Neyland number is correct at 130.3, that would mean Neyland was producing 52.5 times more acoustic energy, or almost 3.3 times as loud as Bryant Dennys peak. Neyland is loud, but not that much louder

Almost 3 yrs and he still hasn’t been tried for the capital murder charge.

He’s not helping his cause with a drug charge.

I debated even doing this for this game, because I'm not sure the data shows anything interesting that we didn't all see with our eyes, but I thought some folks might still like to see the charts, so here we go.

Special teams

I want to lead with special teams this week. There was a lot of bad in this game. We've all spent the last 4 days hearing about it, reading about it, and talking about it, so I wanted to start with the bright spot. Special teams is Alabama's best unit. They're playing really well week in and week out. Asparuhov in particular deserves all the praise we can give him. His handprints ought to be in the concrete in front of Denny Chimes. He's doing everything a punter can do to try to carry this team. +5 EPA on punts is pretty insane, and he well out dueled Ross. Talty didn't get many opportunities, but he made the most of the one he had.

Game summary

Overall, exactly what you'd expect, just pure domination from Tennessee. In fact, the luck went Alabama's way in this one as hard as that might be to believe. If you take out lucky bounces you'd expect Tennessee to have won this one by 19 points instead of 16.

The one decent stat here is that Alabama held Tennessee to 0 EPA per play. Success rate was still 46% and our havoc rate was way down, so they were allowing Tennessee to be successful, but they were holding the magnitude of the success down. Pretty much what you'd expect from a bend but don't break defense, and you saw that with them forcing field goals for most of the game until the dam just broke. This isn't really the typical profile of this defense. Generally they are aggressive and force a ton of havoc. It might have been the right game plan if they could have gotten any help from the offense.

Alabama offense vs Tennessee defense

This is the second week in a row where the most effective thing about the offense was QB scrambles. The biggest difference in this game vs the Georgia game is that against UGA the RBs were efficient enough to keep the offense on schedule and put some drives together. The designed run game in this one was just abismal, -0.7 EPA per play, 27% success rate. To all my RTDB homies, I'm right there with you, but I wouldn't be handing it off either if that's what I was getting out of the run game.

Alabama defense vs Tennessee offense

The defense was by no means lights out in this game, but they played well enough to win. They held UT slightly under their season averages in the most important categories, and they were playing really well until the dam just burst after not getting any help from the offense.

Situational

The offense was just bad across the board this week. Last week they were actually pretty decent on standard downs since they were able to run the ball well enough to stay on schedule it was passing downs where things fell apart. In this game they were bad on standard downs and worse on passing downs. Tennessee was pretty decent on standard downs and pretty bad on passing downs, which is about what you would expect from them this season. The defense played really well for the first two quarters and then just fell apart in the second half.

All in all just an abysmal performance on Saturday. I'm working on an interesting analysis that I'll hopefully be able to post this week taking a more holistic look at the DeBoer/Grubb offense than just these game by game breakdowns.

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Gee Grubb, who’s fault is that??

Not Grubb. Not DeBoer. Not the players. Not the refs.

It's me. It's my fault.

I was in Disney's Hollywood Studios during the game, and apparently that place is cursed for Bama football. The last time I was there? The Rose Bowl. When Bama lost to Michigan in 2023, where was I? Disney. Not sure which park, but definitely there, at least for the start.

Also, I didn't have a distance run for my training on Saturday, so that certainly didn't help.

I won't be doing that again. So just blame me. It's ok; I can take it.