Happy Monday, everyone. Alabama has opened bowl practice, and Austin Hannon at SI has a rundown of Alabama’s early enrollees who are participating. You all know who headlines that list.
Likely Alabama’s top recruit of the current cycle is Julian Sayin, the 6-foot-1, 190-pound quarterback from Carlsbad, Calif. Sayin is 247Sports’ No. 3 rated quarterback in the Class of 2024 — he is alone atop On3’s quarterback rankings.
He has been one of the most talented high school quarterbacks in the state of California for three years now. Sayin came onto the scene his sophomore year. This past season, he was responsible for 28 touchdowns and just one interception during his senior season at Carlsbad High School.
Blake Toppmeyer writes that the NCAA is looking for Alabama to keep Michigan out of the nationat title game.
Imagine the NCAA’s embarrassment at having to recognize Michigan as the national champion while investigating the program for cheating. Alabama can prevent that possibility on Jan. 1 and continue writing what has become one heck of a story in Tuscaloosa.
Saban has assembled plenty of juggernaut teams. This one isn’t.
I’m not going to try to convince you that this roster is full of underdogs who pulled themselves up by the bootstraps. Alabama isn’t 2022 TCU, but it also isn’t 2020 Alabama.
This was a talented but raw, young and unpolished group that looked a wreck in Weeks 2 and 3. Then they did what we love to see teams do: They stayed the course and improved, led by a quarterback whose charisma is nearly as big as his arm. Best as we can tell, they did this without flouting NCAA rules.
Speaking of graduation, that’s kind of a sore subject in Athens right now. The AJC’s Chip Towers wrote a piece about Georgia’s dead-last-in-the-SEC football graduation rate for three consecutive years, and trending downward. Georgia fans jumped all over him about guys leaving early for the NFL, but Georgia is hardly the only program that loses guys early. Football is ultimately going to be detached from academic requirements altogether, but Kirby got an early jump on it.
