Alabama Defensive Coordinator Kane Wommack met with reporters on Wednesday, between the spring’s first scrimmage last week and the one coming up Saturday. He was mainly happy with the defensive performance.
Here’s what he said:
Can you provide a defensive update between the first scrimmage, a handful of practices since then, and the second scrimmage on Saturday?
“In the scrimmage I didn’t think we did a good enough job leveraging the run. Our offense does a really good job of getting hats to the point of attack and they make you crack replace and they do a lot of different things that force your secondary to be able to come up to fit the run and I thought they did a really nice job of establishing some of the run the other day.
“I’ve been really pleased the last two practices with the how I got those things fixed.
“And that’s really all you want to see is if you see a young defensive back make a mistake and you want to get it corrected moving forward. And if we can continue to do that on this trajectory we’ll be in a good position by August 31st.”
What have you seen in way of progress from the young defensive backs?
“They’re hungry. They have an urgency to get things fixed. They have an awareness of what mistakes they made and how to get it corrected. If you walked up in our coaches offices at night – we all go up and grade film on our own as coaches – and when we come back at night there are a bunch of freshmen in every single coach’s room, getting better, learning, taking every mental rep they can. You see them on the sideline, they are locked in. These guys don’t act like freshmen. They act like guys who want to be great and act like guys who have been there before, and that’s really impressive from this group.”
With the amount of depth on the defensive line will that be effective in pass rush from there?
“When you have guys who stay fresh throughout the game, that’s a huge piece of what we’re trying to do now. It’s like body blows in a boxing match. They want to wear your defensive line down so at the end of the game they can go execute against a worn down defensive line pass rush.
“Rotations early in the game are vital for ensuring that we keep mixing guys in the rotation. We have a lot of talent. I believe we will be able to move in and out of four-down and three-four structures, as well as do some other things on the interior, to achieve the desired one-on-one match-ups. Ultimately, it comes down to whether we can get the correct one-on-one match-ups in pass rush depending on the system we’re attempting to implement.
