Tide win, and the first back is still Walker: Jon Rudolph names his man before the Wild Cards

The Crimson Tide beat Injury Prone 110.6 to 96.1 in Week 7, and they're 5-2.

The final landed a little higher on both sides than the numbers posted Sunday night, but the result never moved. It was a Tide win, the way this column had it on Sunday.

Tony Pollard did the heavy lifting. He scored 35 points on 129 rushing yards, the biggest line on either side of that game. Kenneth Walker III scored 7.7. If you only read the box, you'd think the Tide had a new first back.

Jon Rudolph didn't make me guess.

"Kenneth Walker is my first back," the Crimson Tide owner wrote me Monday. "Tony earned what he got Sunday, and he'll keep getting it if he keeps doing that."

Two sentences, and they settle a week of me arguing with myself in this space. Walker is the starter. Pollard is the back who has earned more work and can keep earning it. Nobody got demoted, and nobody got handed anything. That's how an owner talks when he likes both of his options and doesn't want either one getting ideas over breakfast.

Here's why it matters this week. Sunday the Tide go to the Wild Cards' place, and these two are both 5-2 at the top of the Tri-Valley. The Wild Cards did their part in Week 7, taking apart the Strikers 145.64 to 67.52. Dandy, at 4-3, sits a game back. Sunday is for the division lead, outright.

So I asked Tony Lai, who owns the Wild Cards, which Tide back keeps him up at night. I expected him to say Pollard. He didn't.

"Neither one worries me more," Lai told me. Pollard, he said, is the one everybody is going to talk about after the day he just had. "Walker had a quiet day, and that's the guy I'd keep my eye on, because good backs don't stay quiet two weeks in a row. Rudy has two backs who can hurt you, and you plan for both of them."

Here's my reading: the two owners agree on more than either would admit across a table. Rudolph says Walker is his first back. Lai says Walker is the one he'd watch. Both of them are looking at the same man, from opposite sidelines, for the same reason. When Walker gets going, the Tide get hard to stop, and that has been true since September. Sunday at Injury Prone showed the Tide can win without him carrying it. It doesn't show they can do it every week.

What I can't tell you is who gets the ball Sunday, and Rudolph made sure of that. "Who's where on Sunday, you'll see on my chart," he wrote. "I don't set it in the paper."

Fair enough. A depth chart is a question, not a person, and the man who answers it is the one who owns the team. I'm not going to hand you a split of carries I don't have. One big Pollard Sunday doesn't make a backfield, and anybody who prints a split this week is guessing.

The depth answer is the part that interested me most. After Week 5, when Walker sat on his NFL bye and the Tide had their worst Sunday of the year, I asked whether this roster had enough behind him. Rudolph answered that one plainly Sunday night: "Week 5 showed me we didn't have enough behind him, and that's on me, not him."

To my eye, Week 7 is what having enough behind him looks like. Walker had a quiet afternoon, and the Tide still won by 14.5.

Monday Rudolph told me what else he did about it. "On depth: yes, I'm comfortable," he wrote. "After Week 5 I went and got Aaron Jones, and that's why."

I haven't seen Jones in a Tide lineup on a Sunday yet, so for now that's Rudolph's word, and I'll treat it that way. What Jones is for, whether it's third downs, insurance on Walker or something else, is a question I've put to Rudolph. But the shape of it is clear enough. An owner who admits he was short at a position, then goes and fixes it, is an owner paying attention to the right thing.

Now the other side. Lai's plan is not complicated, and he didn't pretend it was.

"Our answer is to keep doing what we did against the Strikers: score points, all of us," he said. "Drake Maye throws it, Jeanty runs it, the receivers catch it. We're at home, it's for the top of the division, and I like where we are. I'd tell Rudy that to his face."

I like that answer, and I like that he'd say it to Rudolph's face. It's also the matchup in one line. The Wild Cards win by spreading it around. The Tide, the way I see them, win when one back takes over. Last Sunday it happened to be the second one.

That's where my worry about this team still lives, and it isn't the backfield. My reading, and only mine: the Tide are thin at tight end, and when the runs stall they haven't shown much that scores in the middle of the field. Juwan Johnson scored 1.2 on Sunday. Rudolph told me Sunday night that if he does anything there, "you'll see it when it's done." I believe him. I'd also like to see it before the Wild Cards.

Rudolph has told us who his first back is. Sunday at the Wild Cards, with the Tri-Valley lead on the table, we find out whether the first back plays like one, and whether the second one keeps earning what he gets.