In sports you can critique every decision and identify every mistake which both of these decisions were. But you cannot change the results in the first half and then state the 2nd half would have played out identically.
The 2nd timeout leaves a significantly smaller window that would have changed with multiple examples of what might have played out differently. The 2nd mistake had a far more direct impact on the result.
As somebody else stated...if we had not made these specific mistakes we just would have made others and still lost. Bottom line we had these 2 mental errors and a couple of ill-timed physical errors all of which led to a loss. My take is only that regardless of all that...if we had a defense that could appropriately line up timely and fundamentally tackle we would have won.
No duh sherlock. That's the point. With those poor decisions by Mullen we lose every time because it's obvious our D won't stop them.
So you want everyone to just ignore the obvious mistakes by Mullen because we can't predict what would have happened had he not made those mistakes. Well, duh, we know what happened when he F'd up those decisions.
And on top of it you want to blow those coaching errors off because we would have just made other mistakes anyways and our D is poo.
Serious question, can you not see how Bama scoring a TD at the end of the half drastically changed the game? It was a huge coaching blunder. It was obvious. Yet, you want to invent other inevitable coaching mistakes in alternate realities and blow off the horrible mistake that did happen. You make no sense. Furthermore, we outscored them 14-0 in the 3rd quarter which means we would of had the lead going into the 4th.
So don't give me that pumper bs about alternate realities that we can't predict when it's painfully obvious how negative the reality actually was with Mullen's mistake at the end of the half.