Alabama football had seen Alex Golesh before. Prior to taking his current job as the head coach at South Florida, Golesh was offensive coordinator at Tennessee.

Last season, with Golesh and Josh Heupel running the offense, the Volunteers beat the Crimson Tide in 2022 for the first time in the Nick Saban era. Heading into the USF game this year, Nick Saban said he was expecting to see a similar scheme to what Golesh had won with last season.

“It’s Tennessee’s offense,” Saban said on his Thursday radio show. “It’s go fast. It’s spread out, wide splits. A lot of good concepts. A lot of tricks and gimmicks and formations to try and make your players make adjustments. And they’re gonna go fast so you can’t play situational football.”

Golesh was operating a far less talented unit this season. USF won just one game in 2022 before he got the job.

Still, Alabama held the Bulls to just three points. Those came on a field goal, and weren’t really the defense’s fault, as they followed a muffed punt deep in UA’s territory.

After the game, outside linebacker Dallas Turner, who led the way with 2.5 sacks for Alabama, said the experience in last year’s game helped the Tide.

“With the tempo and stuff, yeah it did,” Turner said. “Same offensive coordinator coming here, it kind of did help in ways.”

Golesh didn’t show up at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa just trying to keep it close. He and the Bulls went for it fourth down six times.

Fortunately for the Tide, the defense did an excellent job getting off the field, stopping USF on four of the attempts.

“We’re kind of familiar with their style of offense,” Turner said. “We kind of anticipated what they were gonna run in certain situations and we knew that they were gonna go for it on fourth downs.”

The Crimson Tide will be back in action Saturday against Ole Miss at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

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