re: Whose offense will we see this year?

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SouthernRabbit

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Unlike most I read your thesis and I would like to poke a few holes in it.
Here goes:

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They were both too young to remember when Bear Bryant won a national championship in 1961 with a 205 pound quarterback who was just about the biggest player on that football team.

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That's actually not true. Bryant lied like cheap rug regarding the sizes of his players. Linemen that were listed as 185 would show up at pro camps a fer months later at something line 250. That's a lot of cornbread, ya'll.

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With Bryant it was about recruiting great athletes, but not to the point that this was his sole emphasis. Yes, he wanted to wear down the opposition with superior physicality, so as to win the fourth quarter and therefore win the game. But that very physicality might come from superior effort by inferior talent.

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Again another Bama legend. Bryant recruited everybody that he thought could play football. He NEVER recruited anybody that he thought couldn't play in the SEC. There were no limits on schollys back then and he would load up on players just to deny them to other schools. Alabama had the money to support the schollys so he would stack his team that way. He could and did wear anybody down with his depth of talent.

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It was the mental aspect of Bryant's coaching that I think has probably been largely overlooked by the "esperts." They have tended to look at him as a big, dumb ex-lineman, who couldn't have been that smart, especially when you consider his folksy, Southern drawl. I think he may have even encouraged this underestimation of his intelligence.

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Finally some truth. He was smart. He knew football and he knew people. He also knew the NCAA rulebook back and front and knew which loopholes to exploit.

The rest is generally close to accurate.