My take on the defense (a tad long & a bit of X's & O's)

Chavis has always based his defense around requiring an offense to execute via long, sustained drives in order to score. He will not give up the big play, with a few exceptions.

In the 1st half, they scored on exactly that, a long, sustained drive that was aided by a complete BS replay call that allowed a bad ruling on the field to stand (BTW-Replay Crew was from the Big Least. Coincidence? Hmmm).

In the 2nd half, after the 1st drive by our offense, the decision was made as a staff to go into a zone coverage scheme and play the ball in front. This backed the Safeties up even more, and we started playing off the line at corner. This plays STRAIGHT into Holgorsen's hands, as by not re-routing the receiver off the line in this offense means you are at a terrible disadvantage running a zone scheme.

That's because Holgorsen runs his passing offense off a "All Vertical" or "4 Vertical" concept. Saban and other bright defensive minds got wise to Leach's heavy use of crossing routes in his veresion of Mumme's Air Raid, and played a matchup zone that involved "pattern reading". You read the receiver's release-or direction he left the line at the snap going-and defended your zone accordingly.

This requires extensive teaching but can completely bottle up a Leach variety offense. He combatted that by calling Special or "Spec" routes or randomly assigning a receiver to run a different route than normal to throw the Defense off.

Holgorsen & Sumlin do something different. By coming off the line with a vertical release-IE-going straight up the field at the snap at every receiver position-they render pattern reading useless, as none of the receivers are giving the defense any "tells" off the line.

Running a soft zone scheme against a 4 Vertical Offense like that is going to get you shredded, and that's exactly what happened. It was exacerbated because we:

A.) Didn't score early in the 2nd half to put the game away
B.) Coupled the soft zone w/p!ss poor tackling

Beyond that, these offenses always put pressure on linebackers, and that's our weak link. Especially Hatcher. He truly got worked over. He's terrible at zone coverage, and got eaten alive by their Y-Stick concept passing game underneath.

He's proven to be unable to defend the short-zone. He's a penalty waiting to happen when crowding the line and anticipating the snap for an interior gap blitz, and in coverage, he's getting beaten. We already know he takes poor angles (See Arkansas game last year), and now, to add to that, take a gander at the shiteous job of tackling he turned in on that long gainer he gave up. Completley misses the guy and Mathieu has to bail him out.

Hatcher is beyond weak. He's a huge liability for this defense, and we need to get him off the field as much as possible.

If anyone else noticed, after they scored twice in the 3rd quarter, we then returned a kickoff, and went immediately away from the soft zone we'd adjusted to.

As a result, I don't think they took a snap on our side of the 50 in the 4th quarter.

Hope this sheds some light. Just throwing in my $0.02...