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NASHVILLE, Tenn. — It wasn't pretty, but it was enough.
That's the prevailing takeaway from FirstBank Stadium, where Keelon Russell led three straight touchdown drives to lead No. 3 Alabama to a 21-6 win over Vanderbilt in a game that keeps the Crimson Tide's SEC Championship hopes alive.
We'll dive into the good and bad from the team's performance in this week's edition of Tide Up, Tide Down, BamaCentral's reactionary postgame series that evaluates some of the best and worst players, moments, and trends from Alabama's season.
Alabama displayed clean tackling and third-down dominance, and committed just four penalties for 25 yards. It was a massive showing for a team that has shot itself in the foot many times this season.
The offensive line wasn't great in terms of its actual performance, as the injured Russell took more hits than Alabama would have liked. But a fourth-down false start from Racin Delgatty was the team's only consequential penalty of the day, a major step up from the three first-half pre-snap flags on the unit last week in Baton Rouge.
Alabama got Vanderbilt into third-and-longs and took advantage, as the Commodores went just 3-for-19 on third and fourth downs. The few times that Kane Wommack's unit allowed explosives, the defense rallied. There was consistency for the entire 60 minutes. "Bend but don't break" was the term used to describe the unit last week. This week, I have a different phrase: down-to-down excellence.
No group better exemplified that excellence than the defensive line. Alabama sacked Jared Curtis five times, marking the second straight week with five sacks. Going back to Fatutoa Henry's clutch outburst against Texas A&M, the Crimson Tide has 12 sacks over its past nine quarters of play.
The unit flashed dominance early in the season, disappeared for about a month, and now appears to be back with a vengeance. Wommack's defense is hitting its stride.
Hill is the only Alabama player to rush for 100 yards in a game this year, having accomplished the feat against Kentucky in the SEC opener. But the early-season flashes have not come to fruition for the running back room as a whole, and Hill has proven especially disappointing for much of the year.
He hadn't cleared 40 yards in any of Alabama's six SEC contests since that trip to Lexington, and as his production dipped, so did his usage as he failed to log more than nine carries in any of those games.
The junior's 14-carry, 89-yard showing against Vanderbilt offers a much-needed reset for the run game. Someone needs to be able to spark competence on the ground, and it doesn't seem like anyone besides Hill is capable of doing that right now.
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Bouncing off that last point, this has been a long time coming.
Alabama's three-star freshman running back was an early-season revelation and appeared primed to supplant Hill as the lead back after his 90-yard showing against Georgia.
But Brown touched the ball a season-low four times against the Commodores for a total of four yards. He's now rushed for just 62 yards on 28 carries over Alabama's past four games, good for an abysmal 2.2 yards per attempt. After scoring five times over the first five weeks, he hasn't found the end zone since.
His pass protection is nowhere near Hill's, and his explosiveness is nowhere near EJ Crowell's when healthy. If he can't consistently pick three or four yards, there's no real reason for him to be on the field. Brown has still been an impressive player and should be viewed as a key piece of Alabama's run game for next year, but expectations should officially be tempered for the rest of this season.
This series is reactionary by nature. It has made some bold claims throughout the season. Some of these claims have developed into season-long trends, and some of them have not. This is also a series that self-corrects. When it makes a claim that gets disproven in a later game, it gets revised in that week's column.
But at a certain point, there is only so much to react to. There's only so much that we are going to learn about a football team ten games into a season.
We got a solid data point that Alabama is capable of playing disciplined football. Tide Up.
We watched the pass rush look physically dominant for a second straight week, proving that its performance against LSU was not a fluke. Tide Up.
We saw a performance from Daniel Hill that suggests he may be "back." Tide Up.
We saw another poor performance from Trae'Shawn Brown, creating enough evidence for a new statement on his outlook this season. Tide Down.
What else did this team show us that we didn't know?
The Crimson Tide is the No. 3-ranked team in the country, and it doesn't always play like it. It was far from a perfect performance, but we shouldn't be expecting that out of this team. Almost nobody in college football is playing exceptionally right now, and Alabama is finding ways to win games that lesser teams would lose.
That's all that really matters.
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Theodore Fernandez is BamaCentral’s baseball beat reporter and a co-host of The Joe Gaither Show. He also works as a weekend sports anchor at WVUA 23 News in Tuscaloosa and serves as one of the station’s lead high school sports reporters. Fernandez is a news media student at The University of Alabama and is pursuing a master’s degree in sports management.
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