One of the largest recruits ever to be recruited by Nick Saban is still pretty large, but not quite as large as he was.
Freshman defensive lineman Jaheim Oatis has lost 74 pounds in advance of his first season in Tuscaloosa, tweeting days before fall camp started that he weighed 342 pounds after previously tipping the scales at 416.
The Columbia, Miss., native had been listed at 370 pounds by Alabama, or 27 pounds heavier than the next-heaviest player in defensive lineman Tim Keenan at 343 pounds. And at 6-foot-5, Oatis is tied with a couple of others as the tallest among his position group.
“A lot of big guys, they would complain about being that big and having to lose that type of weight,” outside linebacker Will Anderson said Monday. “But he came here, head down, worked hard, lost the weight.”
There might have been a time in the past when a defensive lineman weighing 370 pounds — or even 400 — had a place in college football as an immovable run-stuffer. But the proliferation of spread-passing attacks has shifted the role of defensive lineman from clogging the line of scrimmage to more often providing disruption to the pocket as pass rushers.
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And despite his still-impressive size, Oatis could provide some of that for Alabama.
“Believe it or not, I think Jaheim has got a lot more wiggle than you guys think he’s got,” defensive coordinator Pete Golding said Sunday. “So he’s a guy internally [on the offensive line] that if you leave one guy on him, good luck.”
Anderson has noticed the same.
“I’m very excited about Jaheim,” he said. “For a guy that size to move like that, it’s crazy. Sometimes, I get distracted watching film, watching him take on blocks. It’s like a steel wall, like he’s not moving. He gets those one-on-ones and he’s in the backfield like this fast. It’s great watching him.”
Oatis received an offer as an eighth grader, when he weighed 286 pounds and shared a video of him running a 4.7-second 40-yard dash. Golding, who has been on staff at Alabama since 2018, was his primary recruiter.
“To see his transformation over a four-year period ... obviously we could see on his tape out of his high school career that he could be really special,” Golding said. “You could see a lot of plays where he took a play off and that can get you beat.”
Both Golding and Saban credited Alabama’s director of performance nutrition Amy Bragg in helping Oatis with his weight loss since he arrived on campus as an early-enrollee in January.
“When he [committed] to come to Alabama, he knew what it was going to take, he knew it was going to be hard,” Golding said. “He could have gone to a lot of places where he wouldn’t be asked to do what he would be asked to do here. He knew weight was the biggest thing we had to focus on, and that ended up being one of the biggest [reasons for his] decision to come here.”
Alabama’s defensive line once featured a similarly-large player in Terrence Cody at a time when football in the SEC was played less in space and more concentrated at the line of scrimmage. Cody weighed 370 pounds at the Senior Bowl in 2010, weeks after his final season in Tuscaloosa. He was down to 354 pounds at the NFL combine a month later and then 349 at Alabama’s pro day.
When asked in 2017 if “Mount Cody” would still be recruited in a shifting era of football, Saban acknowledged it would be tougher for such a player to stay on the field unless offenses were in two-back sets.
Alabama still faces some two-back sets, particularly when it has played FCS opponents that run an option offensive scheme. But otherwise the “wad ball” style of offense is mostly relegated to short-yardage and goal-line type situations when the Tide will bring three or four heavy defensive linemen onto the field. Otherwise, Alabama plays its nickel defense — typically featuring only two heavy defensive linemen — about 90 percent of the time, Golding said last year.
Saban noted that more players than Oatis have gotten their weight in check this offseason.
“I am pleased with several of our guys,” he said. “We’ve almost eliminated a lot of weight issues, which comes from a scientific approach — not me looking at a guy and saying he needs to lose 10 pounds, but a muscle mass/body fat correlation that helps a guy be more efficient. And I’m pleased with the way a lot of our big guys have sort of got that into balance.
“It goes back to the kind of choices and decisions you make about what you eat, when you eat it, how much you eat of certain things that can create the kind of increase of muscle mass, decrease of body fat, that makes you a more efficient player.
“When I say efficient, I’m not talking about your ability to do something once. I’m talking about your ability to sustain it for 40-50 plays in a game at the same high level. Those guys have done a good job.”