Vanderbilt’s day against No. 3 Alabama kept circling back to the same problem: the Commodores kept shooting themselves in the foot before the play could even get going.
The most glaring example came midway through the second quarter, when Dontae Carter jumped a Keelon Russell pass and gave Vanderbilt the ball at the Alabama 17-yard line. It looked like a chance to cash in. Instead, the possession unraveled almost immediately.
Maurice Veney was flagged for a false start before the next snap, backing the Commodores up to the 22. From there, Vanderbilt lost more ground on three straight plays, and the drive eventually ended with a 52-yard field goal from Brock Taylor.
That sequence fit the afternoon as a whole. Vanderbilt piled up penalty after penalty, with the offense especially guilty of dragging itself backward. The Commodores were called for seven false starts alone, part of 11 offensive penalties and 14 total penalties for 92 yards when the defense’s three flags were added in.
The numbers told the story even more bluntly: Vanderbilt had 80 more penalty yards than rushing yards.
“Pre-snap operations have been an achilles heel, but in a game where we needed to be able to control the clock and establish a run game, we put ourselves in tough spots and weren’t able to do that,” Vanderbilt head coach Clark Lea said. “We can teach to be fundamentally technically better, but the operational stuff has got to clean up and we control. So, really disappointed in that way.”
The Commodores have been dealing with these issues for much of the season, and Lea has already tried to address them in practice. Before the Arkansas game in mid-October, he said the team had added a rule: for every operational penalty yard in practice, players would have to do up-downs that many times.
That approach helped for a stretch. Against Arkansas, Vanderbilt cut the penalties down to five for 35 yards.
Against Alabama, though, the problem came roaring back.
Lea pointed to the learning curve around freshman quarterback Jared Curtis as part of the issue, saying the offense is still working through the details that come with getting aligned and set properly.
“I think some of it is the growing pains of bringing along a freshman quarterback who’s learning how to adjust the mechanics from the call in the huddle to the line of scrimmage. Obviously, when we’re shifting a motion, before we can motion we have to make sure we’re set. And so some of those are going to be easily corrected and it’s teaching Jared how to slow down and to know to check the field,” Lea said.
For Vanderbilt, the frustration wasn’t just the flags themselves. It was the feeling that the team had been making progress, only to watch that progress disappear in a game where every self-inflicted mistake made it harder to stay in rhythm.
“I felt like we made progress in eliminating these and we played cleaner. Today, it really robbed us of a chance to put pressure on Alabama,” Lea said.
“We never established identity on offense. Why did we not do that?
Because we were constantly behind the chains and hurting ourselves with the operational penalties.”
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