BAMA-USM: Tide gets tune up for next visit from Magnolia State
By TIM GAYLE
After last week’s scare at Florida, top-ranked Alabama entered Saturday’s matchup with Southern Mississippi with plans to work on its running game and its defense, two aspects of the game that struggled at times against the Gators.
Special teams certainly wasn’t a focus, especially after Jameson Williams returned two kickoffs for touchdowns in a 63-14 win over the Golden Eagles at Bryant-Denny Stadium on Saturday night.
Williams became the first player in school history to return two kickoffs for touchdowns in the same game and the first to return the opening kickoff for a touchdown since Gary Martin did it against Miami on Dec. 7, 1963.
The Ohio State transfer caught the ball at the goal on the right side of the field and angled to the left, bursting through a seam at the left hash, spinning away from a defender and using a wall of blockers in the final 60-yard sprint to the end zone.
“We were going to bounce it back to the field,” Williams said. “I just had to hit the hole. I knew it was going to be there, I just had to hit it. I made one man miss. Touchdown.”
He later caught an 81-yard touchdown pass from Bryce Young, then returned another kickoff 83 yards for a touchdown, accounting for 258 all-purpose yards in the process.
“Two in one game was some kind of record, I’m sure,” Alabama coach Nick Saban said. “He’s dangerous back there.”
The Tide rolled out to a 28-0 lead a minute into the second quarter to win their 100th consecutive game against a non-ranked opponent, the longest streak in collegiate history. Young completed 20 of 22 passes, a school record for completion percentage, for 313 yards and five touchdowns, tying another school mark in touchdown passes.
More importantly, the Tide accounted for 211 rushing yards and 606 total yards as Roydell Williams rushed for 110 yards on 11 carries and Jase McClellan rushed for 97 yards on 12 carries, giving Alabama a little more offensive punch that was lacking last week against the Gators.
“We made some big plays,” Saban acknowledged. “Our consistency in the running game is still something that we probably need to continue to work on, continue to improve. We played a team that moves a lot up front and sometimes that gave us some problems, but for the most part we got a hat on a hat (blocking) and guys did a really good job. I see progress being made, I see improvement. I think we just have to continue to build on that.”
Defensively, while the Golden Eagles will never be confused for Florida, Saban thought his unit maintained its intensity for much of the game despite the lopsided lead.
“Look, I don’t think the defense played with great poise the last 40 minutes of the game last week,” he noted. “I think guys got frustrated, I think they let the momentum of the game sort of get to them a little bit. The thing we did today was we kept our poise, we kept playing the next play, we competed well in the game. They did some things like, always it seems, that we hadn’t practiced in terms of a lot of the orbit motion and the options coming off of it, so we made some adjustments to that at halftime. I still think there’s some third-down situations that we need to clean up and get better at.”
Will Hall’s Southern Miss team entered the game as a 45-point underdog and managed just 82 rushing yards against the Alabama defense.
“They're No. 1 in the country for a reason,” Hall said. “It was disappointing that we let them gash us a few times in the kicking game. We've been really good in the kicking game. We’re in year one of developing this program and getting ourselves bigger and stronger and faster. I felt like they did a great job of getting the ball to their play makers in space, putting us in a position where we had to tackle, and we just couldn't bring them down sometimes.”