Power ranking the SEC after week 1: No. 2 - Alabama
If there’s going to be a dropoff after the Nick Saban area, we have yet to see it happen. I don’t think anyone expected to see evidence of a step back through one game into DeBoer’s tenure—especially when that game was against Western Kentucky—but I think most Bama fans liked what they saw out of the Tide on Saturday night.
Milroe was dealing in this one. Freshman Ryan Williams made some really impressive plays, and the offense overall looked extremely explosive—if not quite as efficient as you wanted to see. Though the Tide notched 14.8 YPA (!!!) and 7.11 YPC, they only had a 50% success rate for the game.
I say “only,” like that’s bad—it’s really not. It’s quite good, actually. But you’d expect to see a little higher mark with such high per-carry and per-pass averages. It reflects that most of those numbers came from explosive plays rather than down in and down out dominance.
Again, I’m not trying to say that the Tide weren’t dominant—they were. But you have to grade championship-level teams on a curve, and the Tide have a little bit of room for improvement ahead of the decisive week 5 game against Georgia.