Alabama Football: Can the Tide's Defense Carry Them to a Championship?

The past few years, Alabama football has been all about defense. And when your total defense and scoring defense have both been in the top seven nationally three-years running, it’s a deserved reputation.

This year’s defense could be the best one of them all, and it could lead them to a national championship.

With 10 of 11 starters returning on defense from a unit that only gave up 13.54 points per game while playing in the toughest division in college football, this year’s Alabama defense could easily be the best in the country. The only player who didn’t start consistently was linebacker Jerrell Harris, but he had 24 tackles last season and won the Crimson Tide’s “Bart Starr Most Improved Player Award” this past spring.

Sure, Marcell Dareus is gone, but Alabama has been bringing outstanding recruiting classes for years now, and they’ve blown out so many teams that the backups are both talented and have a fair amount of experience. An injury debacle similar to Oklahoma’s in 2009 would be the only thing keeping it from the conference’s best.

But perhaps the most astonishingly amazing group is the secondary, where every player returns. You’ve probably heard of at least three of them: Dre Kirkpatrick, Robert Lester and Mark Barron. Every one of these players is projected as an early NFL draft pick and come in either one or two in NFL draft guru Mel Kiper’s list of top players by position. That’s just plain ridiculous.

The only thing keeping Alabama from being the consensus No. 1 team is on offense—specifically quarterback. But with so much talent on defense, they won’t have to score much in order to win a lot of games. Or maybe the defense will just score all of the points off of turnovers.

The schedule sets up nicely in terms of home-field advantage, with the only real road problems coming at Florida and at Mississippi State.

The only area that can really be improved on is tackles for a loss. The Crimson Tide were 64th in the country in that category and only 54th in sacks. Granted, it’s not like people were getting too far down the field or scoring that much, but the perfectionist that is Nick Saban cannot be happy about that number or how the Tide lost three games last season.

Expect Alabama to be all business this year, especially for one of the most anticipated games this season when LSU comes to Tuscaloosa.

There’s no denying that defense wins championships; however, offense wins games. But for a defense of this caliber, the offense may not need to score in order to play in the National Championship.

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