If you watched Alabama’s win over Oklahoma on Friday, chances are you’ve already seen the catch - Germie Bernard going full highlight-reel mode with a gravity-defying grab over the back of Sooners defensive back Jacobe Johnson. It was the kind of play that doesn’t just show up on social media - it shifts the momentum of a game and stamps a player’s name into the postseason spotlight.
But here’s the thing: that catch wasn’t a fluke. It was months - maybe years - in the making.
Back in August, Bernard sat just down the hall from Kalen DeBoer’s office, talking about drops. Not the kind of casual conversation you’d expect from a college receiver, but a detailed breakdown of how he trains himself to avoid them.
His routine? Around 200 catches on the JUGS machine, broken into sets of 50, each with a different focus.
And not just routine catches - Bernard’s working on the tough ones. The ones that don’t come easy.
The ones that win games in December.
“Just working on the hard catches,” Bernard said at the time. “When it does happen in a game, I am able to make it look normal.”
Well, Friday’s catch didn’t exactly look normal. It looked like something out of a video game. But it was the product of a methodical approach - focus, repetition, and a relentless drive to make the extraordinary feel routine.
“He’s a dawg,” teammate Lotzeir Brooks said. And after that play? Hard to argue.
Bernard’s acrobatic grab didn’t just earn him a spot on every highlight reel this weekend - it set up a critical Alabama touchdown that gave the Crimson Tide a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter. That score helped seal a 34-24 win over No. 8 Oklahoma and punched Alabama’s ticket to the Rose Bowl.
But again, this wasn’t just a flash of brilliance. Bernard’s been doing this all season - just maybe not with quite as much flair.
According to Pro Football Focus, Bernard has been targeted 97 times this year. He’s dropped one.
Just one. And that lone drop?
It wasn’t even contested. No defender making a play on the ball - just a rare miscue in an otherwise rock-solid season.
That kind of consistency doesn’t happen by accident. It’s not just about having strong hands - though Bernard has those, too.
It’s about focus. It’s about body control.
And it’s about putting in the kind of offseason work that most fans never see.
“You can’t just catch the ball with your hands and look away from the ball,” Bernard said in August. “That’s how you drop it.
It’s all about focus. If you can focus, catching the ball is really, really easy.”
That focus was on full display in Norman. With a defender draped all over him, Bernard didn’t panic, didn’t flinch - he adjusted, elevated, and pulled down a catch that most receivers wouldn’t even attempt.
Tony Ball, a veteran college receivers coach who’s worked with Bernard in the offseason, says it comes down to three things: body control, vision, and consistent hand placement.
“You’ve got to have body control, you’ve got to see it, and then your hand placement has got to be consistent,” Ball said. “That’s one of the first things I saw when we were doing the ball drills. His hand placement was consistent.”
And maybe most importantly, Bernard knows how to use his frame to his advantage. Ball called it a “huge catch radius,” but it’s more than just wingspan - it’s the ability to twist, turn, and contort his body mid-air to meet the ball where it’s going, not just where it’s supposed to be.
“He knows how to tweak his body based on where the ball is,” Ball said.
That’s exactly what we saw on Friday - a receiver who didn’t just make a great catch, but made the right adjustments in real time to make it possible. And in a game with College Football Playoff implications, it couldn’t have come at a better time.
So while the rest of the country marvels at the catch, Bernard’s probably already back to work - back to the JUGS machine, back to the details, back to the grind. Because for him, making the impossible look routine isn’t about luck. It’s about preparation.