Jumbo Package: Gump Day!

wanThere have been other years when Alabama relied primarily on one wide receiver, including the early years of the Nick Saban Era when Julio Jones was the main man. But even with Jones and later Amari Cooper being special talents, there were the likes of Kevin Norwood and Marquis Maze in the picture.

Following Cooper, Calvin Ridley led the Tide in receiving in three consecutive years, but ArDarius Stewart was also a major threat.

Although they were not as prominent as Ridley in 2017, the Alabama offense changed when the trio of Jerry Jeudy, Henry Ruggs III, and DeVonta Smith joined the Tide that season. (Smith cemented his name in Crimson Tide lore when he hauled in a 41-yard pass from Tua Tagovailoa in overtime to give Alabama a 26-23 win over Georgia in the College Football Playoff national championship game.)

For the past two years, joined by Jaylen Waddle in 2018, the receiving troika has been extraordinary. Last year two of them had over 1,000 yards receiving – Smith (1,256 with 14 touchdowns) and Jeudy (1,163 with 10 TDs).

Man, remember the days of complaining that nobody was stepping up to take any coverage off of Julio? Last year it felt like we couldn’t physically pass the ball enough to spread it around to all four receivers.

Man, check out Tua Tagovailoa! Just 5 months ago most of us were worried if he’d ever even be able to run right again. Now he’s moving like this without a hint of a hitch in his step? Crazy.

And some NFL GMs are obviously salivating watching the video. Plus this has to be a bit of a recruiting pitch for guys to see what the Alabama medical staff has helped accomplish with Tua’s nigh miraculous recovery.

Even the guy who now occupies the Ole Miss head-coaching office, Lane Kiffin, agrees he wouldn’t be in Oxford now had that not happened. “That just shows you how stupid this profession is,” Kiffin told ESPN. “If that kid doesn’t lift his leg or they make the extra point [and end up winning], Matt Luke is still here and Joe Moorhead is fired the next day [at Mississippi State] instead of the other way around.

”That’s the profession.”

This is a really, really good long form piece from ESPN on the process and dominoes behind how Mississippi State and Ole Miss both wound up with exciting new coaches.

And that’s about all there is out there worth linking to. Slow news day. I’ll have a nice piece on the new members of Alabama’s secondary posted later this morning for you, so hopefully that will sate your thirst for good football #content for the day.

In the meantime, here’s another round of science lessons, for those interested.

Ever wondered just how an “anti-antiperspirant” in your deodorant made your arms stop sweating? By using aluminum!

Aluminum, when introduced as a salt or hydrate compound, is a coagulant. Which is a funny word to look at, but is a really common process in all kinds of different areas of life. Whether you’re cleaning your swimming pool, producing drinking water, or applying deodorant, coagulation is going to be involved.

Basically, when you think about a liquid like sweat or water, there’s going to be some solid dirt particles floating around in it— what scientists like to call a “colloidal dispersion”. This dirt, by nature is typically going to have a very slightly negative static charge to it that keeps it bumping around in the water and bouncing off other dirt particles. That charge is called a zeta potential. Again, big words for the sake of sounding fancy.

When you put in a coagulant, like aluminum, it introduces an ion that’s got a positive charge to it, thereby neutralizing all that negativity floating around. Well, that’s when Van Der Waals forces take over. You know how planets have gravity and pull moons and other planets towards them? Well, atoms and molecules do the same thing, on a much smaller scale. That’s what the Van Der Waals force basically is. Gravity, but for tiny things.

If you’ve neutralized those big, bad static charges, then the tiny forces get to work, and all those dirt particles start to cling together and become large dirt particles.

In a swimming pool, this process makes the big pieces of dirt sink to the bottom so you can vacuum it up. On your armpits, the aluminum coagulates with the dirt and dead skin cells and actually clogs up your pores. Your body still sweats, but it sends the sweat to other places where it can actually escape.

The more you know.

Roll Tide!