What do they have back on D, 8?
I saw several of their games last year pre-playoffs. They were first in the SEC in ppg last year and return like 8 starters. I guess that’s considered struggling these days.
The reason their defense ‘struggled’ more so is due to the fact that they played a ton of freshmen over the past few years and took their lumps: Tim Smith, Egoibe, Will Anderson, Christian Harris, Shane Lee, Brian Branch, Hellams, Malachi Moore. This will be the best defense we played since Clemson last year (may overall be better). Allen and Anderson on the outside will be the biggest issue for Lashlee to game plan against. Malachi Moore, their main star is a great ball hawk. They have no weaknesses on defense on paper. Tim Smith, a former Paranos special, was super underrated last year as a true freshman nose.
Lashlee clearly improved us last year, though, and without a spring. It’ll be interesting to see how much better we will be with his increased familiarity of our personnel and more time to work with our guys. If King is back 100% and with a ton of guys better prepared, we better play a lot better against them in comparison to the better defenses that shut Lashlee down last year. His stats are inflated in year 1 because he did most of the improvement against a terrible schedule. But, he gets a big pass being new, the fact that he improved, and not having the spring last year. If anything, he has to be more aggressive against Bama. The multiple dive plays to set up the long play action works against the school of the blind more so than in our upcoming game one.