I think Alabama is good, not great. Defensive secondary and offensive line are not where they need to be. Ole Miss is next week and they are not bad and LSU looks pretty good. I watched a lot of SEC football yesterday and I am sorry to say I was not too impressed. I guess we'll see. :?
Holtz was notorious for sand bagging. Sometimes, I wonder if Saban does the same thing. He's had teams that didn't sand bag, but he seems to be playing something close to the vest. What I found disturbing, from a Tide perspective, was how much pressure the Colorado State defense was able to put on the Tide OL. The Tide just had better athletes everywhere and the cream rose as the game went on. It almost seemed like an 'auto pilot' type of win. I would guess that Ole Miss and LSU will see a much different Alabama.
Realistically, I can see Alabama losing a couple of games. I'm pretty sure we will lose 1, it could be 2 or 3. Our OL is just not opening holes.
Alabama played with an incredible amount of intensity and beat an elite A&M team in a hostile, snake pit environment. That was a Herculean effort and one that simply cannot be repeated week after week. A letdown after that game is natural but even though Bama looked like they were suffering from jet lag, you guys handled CSU without too much trouble. Bama remains the Secretariat of college football...
kp, We did our best sleep walking this week against SMU... so I'd have to agree with Bob. It's not reasonable to expect "Play with your hair on fire" intensity for a buy game when you just came off a more intense game. I will say this - we have the most tame front 4 I've seen in a while. We inserted a few freshman DT's against SMU and they had much more giddy-up than the guys who have been logging most of the time...
If that was a ho hum effort then I want my team to be more ho hum. Your QB was accurate and effective, you didn't run as well as you did against A&M but you didn't need to run when the defense was keeping the other team down and your offense was being efficient. Solid win. Whether or not you'll be undefeated this year who knows. It takes some luck to go undefeated in any season. But I can't see you losing 2 or 3 games unless McCarron gets injured.