How Ole Miss’ offense convinced Nick Saban to change Alabama’s

Hugh Freeze, Nick Saban

Mississippi head coach Hugh Freeze, left, and Alabama head coach Nick Saban shake hands before an NCAA college football game, Saturday, Sept. 17, 2016 in Oxford, Miss. (AP Photo/Rogelio V. Solis)AP

Resistance turned into acceptance and, eventually, mastery.

No-huddle offenses, spread formations and run-pass options are all distinct concepts within the game of football, but collectively they created a movement over the past decade that took college football by storm.

At first, Nick Saban had questions. He memorably pondered in 2012 if the speed of the game should be intentionally slowed, saying, “I just think there’s got to be some sense of fairness in terms of asking is this what we want football to be?”

Nine years later, Saban’s stance on the topic has changed, willingly or not.

“I can’t really understand why anybody would huddle,” he told Peyton and Eli Manning during Monday Night Football this week, explaining the stress that not huddling places on defenses. “It’s become a way of life in college football.”

The five-year tenure of Hugh Freeze as Ole Miss’ coach, which included back-to-back wins over Saban in 2014 and 2015, has been referenced multiple times by the Alabama coach as a key turning point in his thinking.

“We were struggling with pace of play, we were struggling with RPOs, we were struggling with sort of this new age of football,” Saban said last October. “That’s when we started to figure out, hey, if you can’t beat them, you got to join them.”

What was once a methodical offense featuring between-the-tackles running and drop-back passing morphed into a high-flying juggernaut that brushed perfection in 2020 while rewriting Alabama’s record books.

Lane Kiffin, tasked with beginning that change while Alabama’s offensive coordinator from 2014-16, later transformed Ole Miss’ offense into one of the Tide’s few peers last season. On Saturday, Kiffin will take a Heisman-favorite quarterback in Matt Corral into Bryant-Denny Stadium and try to pull off an upset that the Rebels have not accomplished in six years.

The makings of those consecutive Ole Miss wins over Alabama trace to 2006, when Freeze served as the Rebels’ tight ends coach alongside then-offensive coordinator Dan Werner. The two became friends in their two seasons together under Ed Orgeron, and when Freeze took over Ole Miss in 2012, he hired Werner back as his offensive coordinator.

The new-age offensive football Freeze and Werner studied from other teams during their time apart was put into practice when they reunited.

“I think the thing that we did that was different than most was either you have a true pro-style offense or you have a true spread,” Werner told AL.com. “I don’t know what the exact definition of spread is, where you’re not doing the pass concepts and stuff like that, NFL-type throws. In my mind, you can do both. We sort of put the two together. I do think we were one of the first ones to do that.”

The first new aspect Ole Miss installed in 2012 was the no-huddle, which had notably been used by Chip Kelly two seasons prior to get Oregon to the BCS national championship game.

“We decided that we didn’t have to put in that many plays, but if we go really, really fast, it makes the defense get set quicker, it cuts down the amount of defenses they can call, and just really puts pressure on the defensive coordinator,” Werner said.

Ole Miss called their speed “Talladega” and the goal was to tire SEC defenses built to stop the run, former Rebels running back Jaylen Walton said.

“Alabama had those big guys on defense,” Walton told AL.com. “We just tried to get them off the field and punch it in.”

On top of the no huddle, Ole Miss began implementing run-pass options, where the quarterback extends the ball to the running back while reading the defense and deciding whether to pull it back and pass. Walton recalls almost every Ole Miss play call being some sort of RPO.

“We ran RPOs to get a chance at more than one look of a play,” he explained. “Some plays might be built in with a screen to a zone, or some plays may be a stretch [run] with a backside route combination.”

In 2012, then-unranked Ole Miss managed only 218 yards and 14 points against Alabama. But their pace irked Saban enough for him to question it four days later on an SEC media teleconference, with Freeze responding that same day.

“I think it’s an equalizer and it’s something I believe in,” Freeze said of the no-huddle. “I have great respect for Nick and what he says but of course we’re going to be on opposite sides of this debate.”

Saban’s defense’s counterpunched, dominating to an even greater extent in 2013. The Rebels were held to 205 yards and were almost doubled in time of possession in a 25-0 shutout loss.

Alabama v Mississippi

OXFORD, MS - OCTOBER 4: Fans of the Ole Miss Rebels hang on the goalpost while celebrating the victory over the Alabama Crimson Tide on October 4, 2014 at Vaught-Hemingway Stadium in Oxford, Mississippi. Mississippi beat Alabama 23-17. (Photo by Joe Murphy/Getty Images)Getty Images

An early October afternoon in 2014 changed the conversation around the two SEC West rivals. The meeting of the Nos. 1 and 11 teams in the country resulted in a 23-17 upset for Ole Miss. Yet it took a pair of late Rebels touchdowns bookending a fumbled Alabama kick return to pull off the win.

“It wasn’t like we were running up and down the field on them, you know? We had a late turnover, and scored to go ahead,” Werner said. “But we played great defense that year and then took advantage of a couple mistakes they had and found a way to win.”

Walton, then a junior, scored the game-winning touchdown on a play Ole Miss had run multiple other times in the game but threw to wide receiver Laquon Treadwell on a screen pass.

“Then, eventually, when the time was right, we faked the screen, caught the wheel route out of the backfield,” Walton said of his 10-yard catch. “One-on-one with the linebacker.”

The 2014 win gave Ole Miss justified confidence entering their 2015 game in Tuscaloosa, one that the Rebels entered 2-0 and exited as the third-ranked team in the country.

“We knew we could beat them,” Walton said of the Rebels, who had scored a combined 149 points in their first two games that season.

Ole Miss’ 43-37 win over then-No. 2 Alabama in Bryant-Denny Stadium was the high water mark for Freeze’s offense, which showcased its new quarterback that could finally break down Saban’s defense.

“I think the big difference was we had Chad Kelly, who had a cannon arm,” Werner said. “We could really stretch the field. When a defense does try to sit down and shut down those short, RPO-type plays, we’d get some double-pumps and post routes and things like that, and that’s what really took us to the next level.

“That’s when we really started clicking when we felt like we had guys we could actually stretch the field with. That’s when we started scoring a lot of points.”

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Kelly threw for 421 yards the next season against Alabama but 359 rushing yards from the Tide were enough to escape with a 48-43 win. Werner was fired by the end of that 2016 season and Freeze resigned amid an NCAA investigation the following summer.

Saban, searching for an offensive coordinator after Kiffin left for Florida Atlantic, interviewed Werner in early 2017 for the job but hired then-New England Patriots assistant Brian Daboll instead.

“[Saban] told me, ‘Look, I’d love to have you on the staff somehow, just to get the things that you guys like to do, the things that are good for you,’” Werner recalled. “Most of the things we did, he already knew about. But if there’s one tiny little coaching point that I can relay to a quarterback, that would help them be more successful, he was going to do it. That’s what he’s all about.”

Saban hired Werner as an offensive analyst.

“Do I need to tell our fans or anybody on our staff the issues that we’ve had with their offense the last couple of years?” Saban said at the time. “Always had a tremendous amount of respect for what they do and how they coach it. I think it will help us on offense and defense to have a guy around here that can add some knowledge and experience to the way they do RPOs, some of the things they did in the passing game. I’ve always had a lot of respect for Dan.”

Alabama adopted more run-pass options under Daboll in 2017, a process that accelerated in 2018 under then-coordinator Mike Locksley, after Werner left to become South Carolina’s quarterbacks coach.

“Locksley and I talked a lot of football -- he’s been doing the same type of stuff as I had been -- so when he took over, it was almost all our type, my type of offense,” said Werner, who is now retired from college coaching and is coaching quarterbacks at Lafayette High School in Oxford. “And obviously that’s the year that they started throwing all over the place and it’s sort of morphed into where they are.”

Alabama Football  2017 Spring Practice 01

Alabama offensive analyst Dan Werner, left, observes from the sideline during Alabama's first spring football practice, Tuesday, March 21, 2017, at the Thomas-Drew Practice Fields in Tuscaloosa, Ala. (Vasha Hunt/vhunt@al.com)AP

Under new starter Tua Tagovailoa in 2018, Alabama led the nation in passing efficiency (197.3) while finishing third in scoring offense (45.6 points per game) and sixth in total offense (522 yards per game).

“Alabama has gotten so advanced, more than just a RPO-style offense, because they’re going downfield with it,” Walton said. “The RPO is more so built for quick reads, but it’s to stretch it sideline-to-sideline.

“Now Alabama has innovated the RPO into deep threats -- as far as deep overs, deep outs. It’s a different combination of routes downfield to where it’s not just a running option but the receiver has all aspects to run whatever route he wants [based on the coverage].

“It’s kind of almost impossible to prepare for.”

But as Alabama’s offense continued to dominate over the past three seasons, Kiffin optimized Florida Atlantic’s offense before making the Rebels his next rehab project beginning last season.

The result last season was 647 yards, the most ever against Alabama, in a 15-touchdown game that Alabama won but had Saban frustrated like his old games against Freeze.

“We were a young group,” Saban said Wednesday. “They were going fast. We were having trouble getting lined up. We were out of position a lot of times, and because we were out of position, we missed a lot of tackles.”

What Werner saw from Ole Miss last season was familiar.

“Lane has really gone exactly with what my philosophy was -- that you can have a pro-style, drop back type game along with the tempo, RPO-type things,” he said. “He and [offensive coordinator] Jeff Lebby, they’re taking it to a whole new level. But it seems real similar to Freeze and I, our little relationship.”

Through three non-conference games this season, Ole Miss leads the nation in averaging 635 yards and 52.7 points per game. Saban sees “some similarities” between what the program ran offensively under Freeze to what it now does under Kiffin, but still called the current system “pretty unique.”

“They run the ball, and they run it effectively, and they’re really good at it,” he said Wednesday. “And then they’re really good at taking advantage of anything you do to stop the run. They’re gonna throw RPOs or play-action passes to take advantage of that.”

Alabama, meanwhile, is third in the country scoring 46.5 points per game -- more than 10 points more than it averaged a decade ago.

“I guess playing against those guys, you almost, at least get to the point where you say, if you can’t beat them, you might as well join them,” Saban said last December. “And that’s why we changed some of the things we do around here.”

Mike Rodak is an Alabama beat reporter for Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mikerodak.

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