AL.com was one of four media outlets granted sideline access to Alabama's A-Day spring game Saturday. This is a behind-the-scenes look at the Crimson Tide.
In most occasions, Brent Key speaks softly with a voice that is a bit raspy. Sometimes it's hard to hear Alabama's offensive line coach. He tends to communicate sotto voce.
But not on Saturday, when he was in the visitor's locker room at Bryant-Denny Stadium, giving the Crimson Tide's reserve offensive line the business at halftime of the A-Day spring game.
"We got to get the damn run game going!" Key shouted at the unit attached to the White Team in this glorified scrimmage. "We're not finishing. We got to get some movement."
Key's message, delivered between breaths of fire, focused on effort.
On the other side of the cramped space, the team's top defensive players sat in rows of chairs listening to coordinator Jeremy Pruitt make a series of adjustments. Pruitt's exhortations, which were loud but measured, were mainly about strategy. He was irritated after watching Jalen Hurts throw multiple bombs over the top of the secondary -- two to Robert Foster and one to Calvin Ridley as cornerback Trevon Diggs was victimized in each instance.
"They are running nine routes," Pruitt said.
Pruitt ordered the players to change up the coverage based on the four-receiver alignment they saw, whether it was a three-by-one or two-by-two look. This is a standard practice in Alabama coach Nick Saban's famed Cover 7, which was designed to combat the vertical routes without leaving the underbelly of the defense exposed.
"They," Pruitt told the players -- presumably referring to the quarterbacks -- "are going to read the free safety."
As Pruitt and Key stood on opposite ends, it almost seemed as if they were yelling past each other. Their myriad complaints, packed into a small window of time, were nothing new.
Since Alabama's first scrimmage, Saban has kvetched about the offensive line's struggles to consistently win at the point of attack while lamenting the defensive backs' poor performance preventing explosive plays from materializing.
"It's pretty obvious to me that we don't have enough respect for the deep part of the field in the back end," Saban said two weeks before on April 8.
Moments later, Saban commented on the offensive line and noted, "I think we have to do a better job up front of getting movement on people, finishing plays and finishing runs."
Those problems continued to manifest themselves Saturday. The defenses for both the Crimson and White teams surrendered completions of 65, 60, 50, 47, 38, 37, and 34 yards while Alabama's four running backs Saturday averaged four yards per carry and had only one rush attempt that exceeded 10 yards.
Early in the second half, after the White team went three-and-out, Key was infuriated. His motivational words apparently hadn't resonated. So, he spewed some invective as the second-string offensive line looked on with hangdog expressions.
"Right now, we have four offensive linemen who can play winning football and another four who have the potential to play winning football that may not be where they need to be," Saban said later. "We're going to play the best five guys that give us the best chance, doing the things I just talked about -- [having] ownership [doing] their job, having a high standard of how we compete and can sustain when things don't go their way."
On Saturday, they usually didn't, which is why Key was stretching his vocal chords from sideline to locker room.