šŸˆ STOP RATE: Final 2024 standings The best defenses in college football at getting stops and preventing points.

My take is that this is somewhat misleading. How many tier 1 offenses did Bama play? Georgia? South Carolina? Tennessee? Maybe LSU? And how many points did they give up in those games? They also gave up 40 to Vandy. Their best effort may have been against LSU. But having watched every game I don't think Bama's defense was that good. They just played a lot of crappy offensive teams. If this defense had played Ole Miss, Oregon, or Ohio State I don't think they would have fared very well.
 
Bama gave up 17 pts a game. 21.75 in sec

Sec opponents avg. 30.35 per game.

So yeah bamas D played pretty good. If they ā€œdidn’t play many quality qb’sā€ no one really did.

The defense played well, good enough to win most games. They had a BAD, BAD day against Vanderbilt. That’s the only loss really on the defense.
 
When did 17 points or 21.75 points per game become good? Seems like we keep lowering the standard.
They played Well, not good. But they did play good enough to win most games. It’s all relative. In 2011 no that’s shit, in 2024 it’s good enough to win. 8th in the country not bad. Offenses are different.
 
It's true that the SEC was weak in terms of QB play. I was looking at the stats and I guess the thing that bothers me is that Bama gave up 137 yards per game in the rushing category. In my opinion that's terrible. That was 48th in the nation. So despite the fact that the secondary was young and the front 7 was full of veterans, the pass defense was much better than the run defense. But I guess you could also attribute that to the bad QB play in the SEC. Regardless, I don't think this was a very good Bama defense. But I will give them credit for not allowing a lot of points. Maybe this is the new Bama style. Bend but don't break. Not suffocating or stingy. Just don't let em score. We'll see if that's good enough to win a title.
 
When the #1 defensive team gives up 12.9 PPG and is stacked full of NFL talent on that side of the ball and playing in the B10 (which isn’t known for their air raid offenses…), that tells me nobody in this era is going to hold teams to under 9 PPG. Again, not in this era. And that 12.9 was with a stud DC and most of the (defensive) players in the system for multiple years. It’s not 2011 offensive environment anymore. Well, except at Tennessee… 🤣
 
I still want to know why the run defense was so bad. In the good old days it was almost impossible to run for 100 yards on a Bama defense. Now everyone is doing it. And this was a problem last year under Saban as well. It's not just under DeBoer and Wommack. What happened to the run D?
 
Bama gave up 17 pts a game. 21.75 in sec

Sec opponents avg. 30.35 per game.

So yeah bamas D played pretty good. If they ā€œdidn’t play many quality qb’sā€ no one really did.

The defense played well, good enough to win most games. They had a BAD, BAD day against Vanderbilt. That’s the only loss really on the defense.

If I remember correctly too in the Vandy game, the offense did not do the defense any favors either. I think the offense put the defense in a couple of really bad spots with short fields.

Looking back, the offense had two 3 and outs that resulted in punts and Vandy drove a grand total of 71 yards to score 10 points off of those bad offensive possessions. Additionally, Milore threw a pick 6 in the first half and had a fumble around mid-field in the second half. The fumble recovery and offensive possession for Vandy resulted in a drive of 53 yards and a touchdown.

So, 4 possessions that resulted in 24 points for Vandy where the offense sucked and couldn't get out of their own way. Defense last season wasn't the problem.

I think the Oklahoma game was much in same in terms of the offense being awful and placing the defense in bad spots.
 
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The running QB's we played, S. Florida, Vandy, OK., killed us and helped up our rushing defensive stats.
If you are going to play against a running QB, you have to Plan to stop him. Our plans didn't seem to
stop them or at least slow them down.
 
Playing a new sceme against a team that features the running QB, of which they implemented new things (just for 'Bama) that was not on film will affect things.

However, it has been stated before & is worth repeating. . . . . The DL play for the last 5 years has been good but NOT GREAT to the standards we've seen before. The recruiting at that position hasn't been stellar either. Last BIG time interior DL was Quinnen Williams (2019 first round draft pick), that's not good. I do expect our ability to stop the run to improve this year simply because the players understand their roles better.
 
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