Kalen DeBoer reveals the one area holding the Alabama Crimson Tide back from being mentioned among the top of the CFP bracket
Kalen DeBoer knows that winning isn’t enough when it comes to CFP seeding.
The Alabama Crimson Tide players did what was asked of them against the LSU Tigers. They avoided any potential noise of a trap game, the defense dominated the Tigers’ offense, and above all else they left the game with a W.
But it wasn’t pretty. Football isn’t a beauty pageant, and an ugly win will always be better than a pretty loss, but you need brownie points to make the top of the bracket. Right or wrong, that’s just how the College Football Playoff committee tends to operate.
And Kalen DeBoer knows it.
Kalen DeBoer says Alabama has to start closing out games
“Yeah, our guys knew that we were going to get a team that, if they were in the fight, they were going to stay in the fight. We knew what we were up against. That’s the way we treated it and I think our guys practiced hard. I know they practiced hard,” said Kalen DeBoer after the game via Alabama’s YouTube channel.
“There’s just some things where we can do better to separate ourselves in the third quarter when we have a chance to put a game away. There’s been a couple of games now where we haven’t done that, and that’s what we’ve got to get better at.”
There is actually a fairly straightforward formula when it comes to closing teams out. It’s called running the football. The problem for Alabama is, and has been, that the team hasn’t been able to run the football the last two weeks.
And certainly not against the LSU Tigers, where the team finished with a season low in yards (56) and yards per carry (2.2). That’s not a recipe for success. Not only when it comes to closing out games, but to winning them in the future.
“We only had 56 yards, so it needs to be better,” added DeBoer. “We certainly [can do] one or two things on each play: do a better job blocking, and then, you know, do a good job of being physical with the ball in our hands too. And you know, falling ahead for yards, those extra one or two yards, three yards that you can get by running through arm tackles and things like that.”
If Alabama can find the run game and Ty Simpson can continue where he left off on Saturday, there is no reason why the Crimson Tide can’t make a push towards the top of the bracket come December.
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