TUSCALOOSA, Ala. — Words are just words.
We're just 25 days away from the beginning of the football season for the Alabama Crimson Tide — but you can feel the fire and intensity from the players already.
Offensive tackle JC Latham, who already dubbed himself as the "Trench King" at SEC Media Days, was one of the first Alabama offensive linemen to talk about the team's mentality in 2023-24.
"I want us to be ruthless," Latham said on March 22. "I want guys to every time we line up and get ready to hike the ball, I want them to be scared of us. I want them to understand that we’re going to hit them in the mouth every single play, ready to go four quarters."
He later backed those statements up at the aforementioned SEC Media Days when he said the Crimson Tide felt "disrespected" amidst all of the Georgia three-peat talk.
His teammate at IMG Academy, Tyler Booker, is the latest of the Alabama offensive lineman to tell the world what Alabama wants to do to other teams on the front this season.
"Fall camp is about development — physically, obviously, but we’re also developing a mindset that we’re going to run the ball on you and be dominant," Booker said.
"Physically dominant. That’s the mindset of the whole room. We want to physically dominate you. We want to intimidate you. We want the third quarter to roll around and the defense to be like, ‘Oh my gosh, we still can’t stop the run, how are we going to stop this run?’ We want guys to tap out. We want guys to fear us. But that’s a mindset that we have to develop now in camp. Being here at The University of Alabama, that’s the mindset of running the ball. You’re not going to play offensive line if you don’t have that mindset. We’re going out there trying to make you quit every play."
Booker attributes a lot of the group's confidence to new offensive coordinator Tommy Rees — who has instilled in the unit that running the football and owning the line of scrimmage is still important in the game.
Rees, somewhat jokingly, said in a past interview that in a different life he would've liked to be an offensive guard rather than the quarterback he was at Notre Dame from 2010-2013.
"First of all, I don’t think Coach Rees has the frame for that, but knowing how he likes to call plays, I think he has the mentality for it, for sure," Booker said.
"Having an offensive coordinator that has that run-first mentality, that believes that we’re going to pass the ball as a compliment to the run, that’s very reassuring to an offensive line, especially ours. We want to make people quit this year, and there’s no better way to do that than running the ball. We’re going to run the ball this year. We’re going to pass the ball as well, because we have a lot of talented guys at receiver. We have a lot of talented guys who can throw the ball well. But having that run-first mentality, that gets us going because we want to make people quit."
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