JC Latham feels lowered expectations are 'disrespectful' to Alabama
NASHVILLE, Tenn. — J.C. Latham doesn’t want to hear your doubts about Alabama’s upcoming season. On second thought, maybe he does. The Crimson Tide offensive lineman has definitely seen the lowered expectations placed on his team after failing to win the national title the past two seasons.
Frankly, he’s a bit pissed.
“Disrespectful," Latham said. "I don’t appreciate that at all. Understanding that I know this group, we’re going to win it all. We’re gonna [win the] national championship, undefeated, Joe Moore, and I want that outcome. Just [use] everyday like a stepping stone and everybody’s improving. We’ve got leaders who play on that team, and we’ve got a great spirit to the team, so we know what we are capable of doing.”
Alabama has been picked to win the SEC in the last seven SEC Media Days preseason polls. Reporters don’t get their ballots until later this week, but when they do the expectation is that most of them will pick Georgia to repeat as SEC champions.
If that’s the case, Latham said he looks forward to proving Alabama’s critics wrong this fall.
“Fuel to the fire,” Latham said. “I know we’re going to go out there and compete, dominate and do what we have to do to win. I know we’re going to win it all and go undefeated, so whatever anybody outside of our family says, it isn’t essentially what matters to us.”
Latham joined Alabama as the top-rated offensive lineman in the 2021 class. The five-star tackle was part of the Crimson Tide team that beat Georgia in the 2021 SEC Championship Game but has had to watch the Bulldogs hold up the national championship trophy in each of his two seasons at the college level.
“I definitely motivates me,” Latham said. “I've watched that game time and time again. I know our guys, we can compete with them. Just seeing them win, just understands, like, I'm not disrespecting them at all. I think they deserved to win. They've worked really hard. I know our guys deserve to have that platform as well. Just seeing them take the stage and take the opportunity that we knew was up for grabs, that we could have taken, just fuel to the fire”
Not all of Alabama’s SEC Media Days representatives were as vocal about the perceived disrespect as Latham. Crimson Tide edge rusher Dallas Turner took a more subdued approach in Nashville, stating that players do discuss the skeptics but typically keep such talk to themselves. Still, he shares Latham’s desire to prove doubters wrong.
“We laugh,” Turner said. "But there’s a lot of people that talk that don’t know a lot.”
Most of Alabama’s detractors point to the team’s notable departures this offseason. Alabama is losing its best players on both sides of the football as quarterback Bryce Young and edge rusher Will Anderson Jr. were selected No. 1 and No. 3 overall in this year’s NFL Draft. While those two will be difficult to replace, the Crimson Tide believes its whole will be greater than the sum of its parts.
"As a unit, as a team we are all doing a great job of understanding like we don’t have Bryce, we don’t have Will,” Latham said. “We all need to be better and we all need to do better because teams are already counting us out because we lost those two.”