“The monotony of the season is hard enough”, said McElroy, who played for McElwain from 2008 through 2010 and is now an analyst for SEC Network.
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“I think the best thing that probably happened to Coach Saban was me getting the Colorado State job so they could get better on offense”, McElwain joked.
Florida coach Jim McElwain knows first-hand the tradition of Alabama and the excellence of the Tide’s coaching staff.
Thursday will mark the final full practice for Alabama before the team heads to Atlanta on Friday.
As he said following Saturday’s game, McElwain remains confident in Harris to lead the offense. We have a bunch of guys who care for each other. “There’s a lot of good teams, a lot of good coaches, a lot of good programs”.
Treon Harris would be a most unlikely candidate to join them.
“I feel like he’s legendary because of some of the things he did in college”, Henry said. “But I’m in college now and I play for Alabama”. It is a system that he grew up in, which is the old system that we played for years and adapted through the years.
Henry met Tebow before a game earlier in his college career, when the former quarterback was at an Iron Bowl. “This is a big game for us”. His longest completion in those contests was 15 yards, just one of three completions to go for more than ten yards. It’s still going to take time, but let’s celebrate what these guys have done in the short time that we’ve been here.
“A lot of people looked at Mac and kind of scratched their head when he used the dead fish reference”, McElroy said on a teleconference Wednesday.
Mini Game balls – Anyone can read a headline, but which players contributed in more subtle ways to the Tide’s fortune? “I just embrace it”. Each of the last four games between the Gators and the Crimson Tide have been won by Alabama, all by at least 19 points. “Just a little disappointing”.
“To be part of the SEC championship game, these two storied programs … year in and year out these are two of the programs that should be playing this game”, he said. The defense, and Henry, have been consistently dominant. “We’ve improved as the season’s gone on. We truly believe that”.
Henry’s stats certainly place him in some elite company – his four 200-yard rushing games this season tie him with two of the SEC’s all-time great running backs: Georgia’s Herschel Walker and Auburn’s Bo Jackson – and have him all-but-guaranteed an invitation to New York City for next weekend’s Heisman Trophy ceremony.
“Not when you’re playing against him”, Tabor said. “We could have held Cook to under 60 yards rushing, but we ended up giving up 180 just off the last two drives”. And if you know what Charlie Tuna looks like, he looks like a smiling, happy-go-lucky tuna, just super pumped up. We feel like we can shut a team down on defense.
The Tide is trying to become the first team to win back to back SEC titles since Tennessee in 1997 and 1998.
McElwain’s first Florida team is a 17.5-point underdog, on the heels of a 25-point loss to Florida State and faces the possibility of another ugly loss in the span of a week.
“The SEC championship is one of the most competitive venues, other than the national championship or [College Football Playoff] I’ve ever been in”, he said.
McElwain never named the movie, but he might as well have been describing Denzel Washington’s flick Unstoppable because that’s exactly what Henry has been this season.
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“That was high school”, he said.
