Nick Saban has said many times through the years that the annual turnover of college football personnel requires every team to create its own identity. We’ve only seen a single game, and it came against outmanned competition, but it’s clear that this team will have a very different philosophy than some recent iterations of Alabama football. And that starts from the top.
We’ve written in these spaces about Saban’s shift toward lighter, quicker players up front in recent years, to be able to run a fast paced spread offense and attempt to stop the same on defense. This created much more of a finesse approach and subsequent identity to some recent teams.