Alabama Football: Front and Center! Who Is Vlachos Mentoring for Next Season?

If it's true that it all starts up front with the big sweaty boys on the line then the man in the middle, the center, is the key to it all.

Center can be the hardest position on the line, it takes great strength as you are usually lined up against one of the best players a defense has. It takes great concentration, you have to do things well each play at a minimum, get a good snap and then a good block and lastly it takes great brainpower.

A good center is like the quarterback of the offensive line, calling out the blocking schemes, seeing if he can catch a guy across the line and quick snap it for an easy five yard penalty and always being wary of a stunt or blitzer coming from somewhere.

William Vlachos is a rare center with all three attributes. He's a weight room monster and even though he's smallish for an SEC center, he has such great upper body strength that he can use that lower center of gravity to move his man with ease. He's also a very smart individual who grasps everything going on around him and almost always barks out the right blocking schemes and you can count on one hand the number of bad snaps he's had with the quarterback over a long and successful career.

Now the "old man" on the line, Vlachos is entering his last season with Alabama, one of the last of the Shula recruits. We had a chance to talk in Orlando after the Capital One Bowl Game and he shed some light on this upcoming season and what his responsibilities needed to be.

Somehow, without prodding from the coaching staff, this team has taken to the concept of mentoring future successors. Vlachos said Antoine Caldwell was the starting center when he was young and Caldwell was unselfish in helping him along. Caldwell was selected in the third round of the NFL draft and is now a professional in Houston for the Texans.

Though he had great coaches along the way, he said not only the help, but the encouragement he got from Antoine helped him a lot. Now it's his turn to mentor the future players.

Though the Alabama team has many people who are capable of being a backup at center, the real long term true center is Chad Lindsay, a redshirt freshman from The Woodlands, Texas.

Lindsay is similar to Vlachos in size but still has a way to go in strength. Lindsay is 6'2'' and about 279 pounds and Vlachos is listed as 6'1'' but may only be 6' and some fraction of an inch and about 290.

"He's (Lindsay) about where I was at that time but he's got a little more experience at center than I did at this time. So if we can keep in the weight room and bulk him up a little, I think he'll do fine." Vlachos told me.

Both players played guard in high school, but Lindsay will have had three years training for the center's job before inheriting it. Studying behind Vlachos has been a good thing for Lindsay as he's seen what it takes for a smaller lineman to take on someone bigger and usually faster and do it so well.

In practice last week, Tyler Love took the duty of snapping up in practice and offensive line coach Jeff Stoutland will "try out" maybe two more people just to have some depth ready in one of those unforeseen emergencies that can crop up, but Lindsay will land the backup job.

"I owe a lot of people on this team for helping me get where I am." Said Vlachos, "As a senior, it's up to me to give back now so the team can just keep going strong."

That's the way it should be on every team, that's the way it is, at Alabama.