Discipline has been a hot topic surrounding the Alabama football team, especially after games in which they have lost.
Penalties have been a major issue so far this year, and Malachi Moore’s actions at the end of the Vanderbilt game showed a lack of discipline during the moment.
When questioned about the discipline issue on Wednesday, DeBoer gave some clarity on how he thinks his team’s discipline has been so far this year.
"There's discipline in a lot of areas," he explained. "There's discipline just with off the field; discipline with the things that happen around the program each day, just your discipline with your schedule in the classroom and just stay on top of things; and then there's the discipline on the football field.”
"And I can tell you, our team has an extremely high level of discipline in a lot of those ways that I'm mentioning," he added.
Alabama has shown a great amount of discipline off the field, but the on-the-field discipline has been lacking, to say the least.
“There have been a lot of times where sometimes our awareness or just understanding of emotional discipline at times as well just has been something we haven’t been as sharp as we need to be with," DeBoer said. “I think we’ve gotten extremely better. But there’s penalties still being called and things that are happening that we’ve got to continue to improve on.”
Alabama was penalized 15 times in its most recent loss at Tennessee and is currently the 129th most penalized team in the nation, averaging 8.62 penalties per game. Only four other teams have been penalized more than Alabama.
Averaging over eight penalties per game is unacceptable and is a surefire way to get you beat.
What is DeBoer’s plan to improve the discipline issues on the field?
"There's ways that we manage that, whether it be consequences or whatever it might be, even during practice," DeBoer said. "So we know it's an area that we will always work to improve because I think you can always get better at it. Because all it takes is one guy here, one guy there, and that can happen, because if we did that with every player on the team, it would never end.”
"So we're working at it," he continued. “I think there's a lot of really good guys that care a lot about the team and do a lot of really good things off the field and even on the field, and are working hard to improve that emotional discipline, that awareness that we need to have in certain situations."
No. 14 Alabama is off this week but will travel to face No. 16 LSU on Saturday, November 9, at 6:30 p.m. CT. The game will be broadcast on ABC.
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