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Wasson: Alabama’s Jalen Milroe delivers throwback performance to keep Tide’s Playoff hopes alive
By David Wasson
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In the current era of football, from Pop Warner to professional Sundays, throwing the football seems like the only way to win.
Sure, there are outliers. Army hasn’t passed for 700 yards yet this season and is still 9-0 … but more and more every year, quarterbacks are lighting up stat sheets and scoreboards with non-stop aerial attacks.
Saturday night, however, in one of college football’s most intimidating environments, the nation saw a virtual Back To The Future brand of football displayed by the Alabama Crimson Tide against LSU.
The star of this show was Jalen Milroe, who at early junctures this season was a Heisman hopeful but has seen his spotlight fade after losses to Vanderbilt and Tennessee.
Depending on who you asked, Milroe was either confounded by new Tide coach Kalen DeBoer’s offensive system, hobbled by an undisclosed injury or finally solved by SEC defenses. But any way you sliced it, Milroe was yesterday’s news.
Until Saturday night, that is.
Milroe sliced and diced the Tigers all night long underneath a sky that alternated from drizzle to downpour, rushing for 185 yards on 12 carries and 4 touchdowns to reassert himself as a genuine problem and lead the 11th-ranked Crimson Tide to a 42-13 victory that emptied Tiger Stadium of nearly everyone except boisterous Tide fans by the final horn.
The win moved Alabama to 7-2, and more importantly kept alive the Tide’s hopes for a berth in the inaugural 12-team College Football Playoff. On the flip side, No. 15 LSU (6-3) saw its outside shot at earning a Playoff spot rinsed away by 60 minutes of throwback football that would’ve made your grandfather proud.
This was the same venue, after all, that witnessed LSU legend Billy Cannon deliver an earthquake-registering run for the ages in 1959. Saturday, 65 years and 9 days later, it was Milroe who was chewing up yard after yard of Tiger Stadium turf against the confounded Tigers.
In many ways, Saturday’s performance has always been Milroe’s milieu. The junior rushed for 531 yards and 12 touchdowns in 2023, and entered Death Valley with 12 rushing touchdowns this season. But while Milroe statistically has been remarkably similar this season to his sophomore campaign, Alabama losing twice before November and Milroe playing uncharacteristically unremarkable had Tide fans and independent onlookers alike wondering what was up.
Was Milroe hurt? Was DeBoer trying to wedge his talents into an uncomfortable square-peg-in-round-hole mold? Had SEC defenses just finally figured Milroe out?
As it turns out, the answer likely was none of the above – because Milroe did all kinds of Milroe things against LSU.
DeBoer called Milroe’s No. 4 on 8 different first-half plays for 98 rushing yards – 1 more yard than Milroe passed for in the first 30 minutes. Milroe not only gained yards in bunches (ripping off a 39-yard run for a game-opening TD) but also in bruising bits (including a couple 3rd-and-short runs to keep drives alive) and in singular brilliance (sprinting 10 yards for a another TD late in the second quarter that put the Tide ahead 21-6).
“He’s got a superpower when it comes to running the football,” DeBoer said afterward of his star quarterback. “He’s not just a guy that gets first downs. He gets into the end zone. What he was able to do early on really got the ball rolling.”
The Crimson Tide clearly wanted to establish the run against LSU, calmly running the rock 28 times in the first 30 minutes against just 15 pass attempts. And when Alabama did go to the air, 6 of their 10 first-half completions went to either Jam Miller or Justice Haynes out of the backfield.
Alabama’s defense was also a bit of a throwback, allowing just a pair of LSU field goals – LSU’s lowest halftime point total in nearly 3 seasons. That bamboozlement of the Tigers continued early in the third quarter, too, as LSU quarterback Garrett Nussmeier drove his team down to the shadow of the goal line on the opening possession – only to uncork an interception to Deontae Lawson in the end zone to thwart the threat.
Milroe and the Tide would respond by matriculating it down the field on a drive that would have brought a smile to the face former Kansas City Chiefs coach Hank Stram. Alabama went 80 yards on a bruising 8-play drive that featured 6 runs (only an incomplete pass and a sack that was negated by by a 15-yard LSU face mask penalty) and was capped when Milroe outraced the Tigers for a 19-yard score and a 28-6 advantage.
By the time the fourth quarter rolled around, and Alabama had already caused plenty of Tiger fans to storm the parking lots around Death Valley, Milroe made it official for the Tigers themselves – erupting for a 72-yard rushing score to make it 35-6 and trigger brake lights in bunches around Tiger Stadium.
Whether anyone likes it or not, Alabama seems to have caught a second wind for a Playoff push at precisely the right time. Losses by Miami and Georgia will shuffle the top spots in the CFP Top 12 more than a bit, but the Crimson Tide’s convincing road win against LSU also bolsters their resume to at least stay in the conversation.
And with FCS Mercer, fading Oklahoma and woeful Auburn on the remaining slate, Alabama can only further burnish its bona fides in what has become a wide open SEC picture.
The change of fortune came courtesy of No. 4 on Saturday night, a deliverance of a throwback performance for the ages when the Tide needed it the most and a performance that harkened to both 50s-style football and to more recent memories of Jalen Hurts – a dual-threat force that helped lead Alabama to enough rings to make a jeweler blush.
Is that Alabama’s future? Impossible to say, in this topsy-turvy college football world we live in now. But Saturday night in Death Valley, Milroe and the Tide proved a whole lot of doubters wrong again.
An APSE national award-winning writer and editor, David Wasson has almost four decades of experience in the print journalism business in Florida and Alabama. His work has also appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and several national magazines and websites. He also hosts Gulfshore Sports with David Wasson, weekdays from 3-5 pm across Southwest Florida and on FoxSportsFM.com. His Twitter handle: @JustDWasson.
