Another season is over for Alabama, and another coordinator is off to a different job. This time it's former defensive coordinator, Jeremy Pruitt, who navigated Alabama's defense through a challenging season of one injury after another. Despite the injuries, Alabama had the top-ranked scoring defense in the country, held Clemson to six points in the College Football Playoff semifinal, and shut down Georgia in the second half of the championship game.
Saban now must replace Pruitt, and Alabama's coach indicated after the 26-23 victory against Georgia that he will hire from within. That has been his pattern through the years, and one of the reasons Alabama has remained elite defensively despite constant turnover to the staff.
The other reason, of course, is Saban himself. "All the time we've been at Alabama and all the time we've been at LSU we've always played the same system on defense but we've always been able to hire somebody who knew the system, who had been in the system before," Saban said. "Kirby had been in it before, Will Muschamp learned and Jeremy had been in it before. So, it was an easy transition for them to continue to implement the same thing for the players. "We'll have to look at what we want to do to try to get the best coaches in there to help our players, develop our players with this next group, but we have some good coaches on our staff."
"One of the things that makes me most proud of this team is ... we've never had this many games missed by starters in a season ever," Saban said, "and to be able to overcome that with the way they played together as a group and trusted and believed in each other, and I think that respect and trust is something that's really important to have in a good team."
