{"id":791764,"date":"2026-03-04T16:15:17","date_gmt":"2026-03-04T16:15:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/791764\/"},"modified":"2026-03-04T16:15:17","modified_gmt":"2026-03-04T16:15:17","slug":"alabama-football-looking-at-the-defense-ahead-of-spring-practice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/791764\/","title":{"rendered":"Alabama football: Looking at the defense ahead of spring practice"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup _1teeyfa8 ls9zuh1\">King remembers the \u201cuncomfortable conversation\u201d vividly. Franklin and his mother sat in King\u2019s office. Franklin wanted to move to the defensive line, a position King knows better than anyone. King played defensive line at <a target=\"_blank\" href=\"https:\/\/sportsdata.usatoday.com\/football\/ncaaf\/teams\/alabama-crimson-tide\/3478\/\" rel=\"noreferrer noopener nofollow\">Alabama<\/a>, finishing his career with experience at all three positions. And for Franklin to be successful, he had to choose violence, King said. He had to attack, to be quick, to be conditioned.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup _1teeyfa8 ls9zuh1\">\u201cHis challenge is to show me that he could do it,\u201d King said.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup _1teeyfa8 ls9zuh1\">Franklin\u2019s mother\u2019s response was simple.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup _1teeyfa8 ls9zuh1\">\u201c(Franklin\u2019s) mom looked at him and said, \u2018Coach don\u2019t believe you can do it,\u2019\u201d King said. \u201c\u2018You\u2019re going to make him eat his words.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup _1teeyfa8 ls9zuh1\">Growing into a 6-foot-6, 265-pound monster off the edge, Franklin had 98 tackles, 23 tackles-for-loss, 11 sacks and a forced fumble in his first season as a starter, per 247Sports. He was large, but nimble, able to run to the ball, knock piles back and secure sacks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"King remembers the \u201cuncomfortable conversation\u201d vividly. Franklin and his mother sat in King\u2019s office. Franklin wanted to move&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":791765,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[2400,35580,7,49,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-791764","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ncaa-football","8":"tag-alabama-crimson-tide-football","9":"tag-alabama-crimson-tide-basketball","10":"tag-football","11":"tag-ncaa","12":"tag-ncaa-football"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@nfl\/116171802286667063","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791764","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=791764"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/791764\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/791765"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=791764"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=791764"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/nfl\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=791764"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}