Even though the secondary was arguably the best secondary we ever had, the front seven were still a question mark at the beginning of the year.
Bryant Young and Devon MacDonald were the only two "for sure" starters on that defensive line, Demetrius DuBose and Anthony Peterson were the only locked in starters at linebacker.
It wasn't until the BYU game that somehow, all of the other pieces of the puzzle clicked together, and it still took an entire half of that game to get things in place. Still, it was nice to see that we could shut down that prolific pro-style passing attack that Lavell Edwards used so well.
That's when Jim Flannigan, Brian "Hambone" Hamilton, and Oliver Gibson stepped up their game on the defensive line, and Karmeelyah McGill locked down the linebacker spot (some had him listed as a defensive end, but he did play mostly linebacker / rush end). From there, everything on defense seemed to function so well as a team.
Being able to beat four ranked teams (including two top 10) in a row at the end of the year showed that this defense was for real.
If that defense had been able to play that way at the beginning of the year, there's no doubt we blow out Michigan, and don't get gashed by Stanford. By the end of that year, we were the best team in the nation, and even the die hard Crimson Tide fans would acknowledge that we would have made life miserable for them.