ARKANSAS VS. NO. 7 TEXAS : Arkansas keeps plugging
Posted on Wednesday, September 24, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE - Alabama's first snap Saturday against Arkansas might as well have been an invitation to rumble.
There wasn't an ounce of finesse in the power run up the middle, which blew open for 17 yards for Crimson Tide tailback Glen Coffee.
Unfortunately for the Razorbacks, Coffee averaged nearly 17 yards on all of his 10 carries, which included touchdown runs of 87 and 31 yards, as Alabama ran through massive creases in the Arkansas defense.
Coffee finished with 162 rushing yards as part of Alabama's 328-yard effort on the ground in a 49-14 victory.
Not surprisingly, the Razorbacks expect other teams, including No. 7 Texas on Saturday, will try to run them over as well following Alabama's success.
"I believe they will try to do that,"middle linebacker Jerry Franklin said. "If I was a coach on another team, I would try to do the same thing, but we will get it together and stop the run."
Arkansas fell to last in the SEC, 94 th in the nation, in run defense after the Alabama game and is allowing 185. 3 rushing yards per game.
Though Texas Coach Mack Brown played it off publicly at his Monday news conference - "Arkansas is a much better team than the score indicated last weekend because Alabama had four really long plays,"he said - the Longhorns staff is aware of the Razorbacks' vulnerability against the run.
Texas averages 204. 3 rushing yards per game, 5. 1 yards per carry and has scored seven touchdowns on the ground.
Alabama had four rushing touchdowns against Arkansas.
Coffee's fifth carry was a romp over left tackle on which Tide blockers collapsed the right side of Arkansas' defensive front, and Coffee left safety Rashaad Johnson standing flat-footed in the hole on his 87-yard run to the end zone.
"When it's that easy, you've just got to run,"Coffee said.
The Crimson Tide's average of 9. 4 yards per carry - which also included a 62-yard touchdown run by Roy Upchurch, who has had surgeries on both ankles - was disheartening to Arkansas defensive coordinator Willy Robinson.
"It was just so disappointing,"Robinson said. "We thought we had loaded up the box well enough to help ourselves out, and we thought we'd been getting better at our tackling, and today we just didn't do either one."
The disturbing display had Arkansas Coach Bobby Petrino fielding questions this week about what went wrong. Was it the scheme ? Personnel ? Assignments ?
"You can't re-evaluate scheme, you know,"Petrino said. "The one thing you do when you struggle is you don't try to change and keep changing things, because then you never improve.
"What we need to do is improve on what we're doing. Do it better, do it more precise. We need to tackle better. Our D-line has done a better job of keeping their shoulders square, using their hands. We just need to fit better from the linebacker spot, from the safety spot to prevent those long runs, and to tackle well."
One factor which has to be considered is that Arkansas matched up against a veteran, physical Alabama offensive front with less experienced, smaller linebackers and safeties.
Senior safety Dallas Washington pointed his finger at execution, or a lack thereof.
"The main reason a lot of those long runs were squirting through and breaking were a few times some of us as safeties and some of the linebackers weren't fitting in the right gaps, which create holes,"Washington said. "To stop the run, everybody has to be gapped out in their correct gap or the back will squirt through."
Washington also didn't concede a talent edge to the Crimson Tide.
"A lot of it wasn't athletic ability, but more so effort,"he said. "Tackling is how bad do you want to make a tackle. Defensively, we've got to get a little bit tougher."
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