Tide Tidbits – April 10, 2009

Tide holds 2nd scrimmage today
Alabama will hold its second scrimmage of the spring this morning at Bryant-Denny Stadium and head coach Nick Saban will use it as a test of sorts to see how his team reacts under pressure. “In this particular scrimmage, we’ll do even more different situations to see how the players respond to them,” he said. “This is the next step they need to take in their development and their improvement as players, to be able to go out there and make adjustments (and) think in no-huddle situations.” See also: A few key themes for Alabama’s second spring scrimmage …

Swinney seeks packed house for spring game
Dabo Swinney challenged Clemson football fans to turn out for “I’d love to see us break the attendance record this weekend.” Spring game attendance has spiked in recent years at places such as Alabama, Nebraska and Ohio State. Two years ago, the Crimson Tide set what is recognized as the national record with 92,100 fans in coach Nick Saban’s first year. Last year, they drew 78,200, second to the 80,149 at Nebraska. Ohio State, which charges $5 for admission, counted more than 75,000.

So… does anyone know any 300-plus pounders who can do backflips?
Do you? Finding a 300-pounder who can do a backflip is difficult. Yet unbelievably, Alabama appears to have two such players. I had heard Kerry Murphy could do one, so I asked him in January. “That’s true,” Murphy said. Now, you can see photographic evidence right on this page. Six-foot-5, 365-pound nose tackle Terrence Cody, himself an acrobatic marvel, also happened to be in the room at the time. So I wandered over to him to broach the topic. “I can do one, too,” Cody said. “I swear to God.”

Kerry Murphy: “I saw my mom working two jobs just to pay for these courses, I knew I couldn’t fail.”
One of the coolest things I’ve heard in a long, long time was the reaction from Rosetta Murphy to the news that her son Kerry had become cleared by the NCAA to play for the Crimson Tide. Kerry Murphy told me yesterday, on the road to T-Town to enroll at Alabama. “I just started working hard. I saw my mom working two jobs just to pay for these courses, I knew I couldn’t fail, man. It was a lot of work. But it really hasn’t been hard because I dedicated myself to it. Mainly, the hardest part was seeing my mama work so hard just to pay for all this.”

Uh oh… Depth chart question alert!
Yesterday, I hit him [Saban] with another depth chart question. And even though he was amped up, even after a practice he described as “bad,” there was no fire. There was no uproar. It was odd. Just some needling. Then Saban answered the question: “There’s a lot of competition out there and, again, we’re not so anxious to put somebody in front of somebody else,” Saban said. “We experiment a lot with guys. Our focus is on continued development, continued improvement. We’re not really concerned about who’s first or who’s second. We’re pleased with a lot of players’ progress. We’re certainly not disappointed in what we’ve been able to accomplish at this point in the spring. But at the same time I think, to varying degrees and varying levels, there’s a lot of different players that need to work on certain things to improve so that we can improve as a team, and have more guys that can play winning football.”

The SEC’s Top Defensive Players…
As the old saying goes, “Defense wins championships”. Well this proves to be right, since every single national champion in the BCS era has had a top five ranked defense. Here we are going to go over the players that hope to bring another national championship back to the SEC. The list includes Alabama players Rolando McClain, MLB and Terrence Cody, NT.

Roll Tide!

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