Alabama Football: 3 overreactions to win over Tennessee in Week 8

3. Alabama’s defense is better than you think

Alabama’s defense has been much maligned by fans and prognosticators across the country so far this season. We’ve grown so accustomed to dominant defenses under Nick Saban that any form of slippage, however minor, produces major reactions.

And of course there was bound to be slippage on that side of the ball in 2019. Alabama has, at times, started four or five freshmen on the defensive side of the ball. The front-seven in particular is full of youth, with true freshmen like DJ Dale, Justin Eboigbe, Byron Young, Shane Lee, and Christian Harris being tasked with major roles.

The issues at linebacker have been at the forefront with both Dylan Moses and Josh McMillon — the projected starters in the preseason — being lost for the season during fall camp. Harris and Lee are both quality players, but they don’t have an alpha like Moses to lean on, which has led to a few more mental lapses than we are used to seeing from a Saban defense.

But if you haven’t noticed steady improvement from those two — and the defense as a whole in recent weeks — then you are being willfully ignorant.

Traditional numbers aren’t as kind as usual — Alabama’s total defense ranks 26th in the country, though even that isn’t as bad as many fans would have you believe. But traditional numbers in today’s college football fail to paint the whole picture. In the spread era, where teams are routinely firing off snaps as quickly as they can, yards-per-play defense is a better measurement of how effective a unit is.

After the 35-13 win over the Vols where the Tide held Tennessee to 231 yards on 61 snaps (3.79 yards-per-play), Alabama moved up to 13th in the country in that metric.

Going further, taking a look at Bill Connelly’s SP+ rankings on ESPN — rankings that remove garbage time statistics — Alabama’s defense ranks seventh in the country.

The defense is almost certainly better than you think it is. This isn’t a 2011 or 2015 Alabama defense by any stretch, but it is still a unit loaded with talent across the field. A unit that is more than capable of picking up the slack for an offense that could be in for an identity crisis with Tagovailoa sidelined.