Kalen DeBoer reacts to Alabama football’s offensive performance after Florida State road loss

The Alabama Crimson Tide suffered a 14-point road loss to Florida State on Saturday, but the Crimson Tide’s head coach Kalen DeBoer believes he has a good football team.

DeBoer believes Alabama’s offense will not reach its full potential until the unit stops being hesitant.

“The name of the game is that we can’t be hesitant early on,” DeBoer said. “We’ve got to start faster in all ways. Yes, I know we went down and scored on the first drive, pieced some plays together and found a way to put it in the endzone, but just the next couple series – both sides of the ball – we’ve got to do a better job, we’ve got to do a better job. And we had opportunities there in the second half, but we gave them life. We gave them hope and confidence in the first half there and then what it does is it puts you in a spot where you’ve got to be perfect and you’re playing from behind and you’ve got to be perfect and the stress on the guys to make every play becomes greater and greater.”

As it pertains to the offense, DeBoer believes quarterback Ty Simpson needs to start trusting his reads and letting it fly more, adding that Simpson’s critical thinking will be something that will get better over time.

He also said the offense needs to do a better job of helping Simpson. At times, Alabama’s offensive tackles allowed Simpson to get immediately pressured as they got beat by Florida State’s edge rushers. Plus, Alabama had multiple false start penalties called on them, putting Simpson further and further away from the first down marker on critical downs.

When it comes to the running game, the Crimson Tide let four running backs get touches today, but there were not enough explosive plays, according to DeBoer.

“I think there were hard yards in the first quarter that we did have,” DeBoer said. “We were able to stay ahead of the chains and continue to do that and then the game going into the third quarter for sure you’re trying to be patient, but you know those possessions are counting down on you. But I thought we did a good job staying committed to it as we went into the fourth quarter there again hitting some plays up the middle. There needs to be a better consistency. We didn’t have any explosives like we need to have. It’s hard to put drives together when you don’t have chunk yardage plays. They hit their explosives at times, the reverses and things like that, the ball down the field on the first drive. We had some explosives too but most of them were in the air.”

DeBoer said there are “no excuses about what happened” and believes it will be an uphill climb for Alabama this season.

Next Saturday, the Crimson Tide will have a chance to bounce back at home against UL Monroe.