First-year starting quarterback A.J. McCarron and the kicking game were supposed to be the Alabama Crimson Tide’s biggest hurdles to a national championship. The LSU Tigersand the Tide were all but inseparable in most areas of the field, but LSU had more experience and pure playmaking ability at the QB position, while their special teams were supposedly much better than Alabama’s.

Jeremy Shelley and fellow kicker Cade Foster combined for four field goals in the BCS National Championship game, making up for their poor performances in Alabama’s loss to LSU earlier in the season. Head Coach Nick Saban was very pleased with his kickers, who helped guide Alabama to a win.

“Jeremy did a great job in the game. We have a lot of confidence in Jeremy. He doesn’t have great range, but when we get it down there by the 25-yard line he does a pretty good job for the most part. We got one blocked and he pushed one to the right a little bit. But we’re just going to keep on giving him opportunities, and I think he did a great job.”

While the kickers redeemed themselves, McCarron did much more than that, and his play was perhaps the biggest story of the game. Though he did not throw a touchdown pass, he made a number of big plays to move the Alabama offense down the field and into field goal range, even when the LSU defense was doing a good job of containing Trent Richardson.McCarron was humble, praising Richardson and the coaching staff for their role in the win when asked about his performance.

“We’ve been leaning on No. 3 [Richardson] all year. He’s our workhorse. I mean, he’s our main guy … I don’t think I did anything special, really. I mean, I always bust my butt in the film room. I mean, it helps when you got a little longer, you can study them a lot more. But I bust my butt in there, and I know everything they want to do. Certain downs and distances. But that goes back to our coaching staff. We have the best coaching staff in the country.”

Alabama are losing Richardson and a number of key defensive pieces, but Nick Saban will be happy that he doesn’t have to worry about his quarterback or kicking game going into next season.

Source: SB Nation.

*Taken from Yahoo News.

A continuing weak economy and last month’s bipartisan tax cut legislation will drive the government’s deficit to a record $1.5 trillion this year, a new government estimates predicts. The eye-popping numbers mean the government will continue to borrow 40 cents for every dollar it spends.

The new Congressional Budget Office estimates will add fuel to a raging debate over cutting spending and looming legislation that’s required to allow the government to borrow more money as the national debt nears the $14.3 trillion cap set by law. Republicans controlling the House say there’s no way they’ll raise the limit without significant cuts in spending, starting with a government funding bill that will advance next month.

The CBO analysis predicts the economy will grow by 3.1 percent this year, but that joblessness will remain above 9 percent this year. Dauntingly for President Obama, the nonpartisan agency estimates a nationwide unemployment rate of 8.2 percent on Election Day in 2012.

The latest figures are up from previous estimates because of bipartisan legislation passed in December that extended Bush-era tax cuts, unemployment benefits for the long-term jobless and provided a 2 percent payroll tax cut this year.

That measure added almost $400 billion to this year’s deficit, CBO says.

The deficit is on track to beat the record of $1.4 trillion set in 2009. That figure reflected huge outlays from the Wall St. bailout. The nonpartisan budget agency predicts the deficit will drop to $1.1 trillion next year.

“The fiscal challenge confronting us is enormous. To solve this problem, it will require real compromise and a great deal of political will,” said Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, D-N.D. “We need to have both sides, Democrats and Republicans, willing to move off their fixed positions and find common ground.”

The chilling figures come the morning after Obama called for a five-year freeze on domestic agency budgets passed by Congress each year. But those nondefense programs make up just 18 percent of the $3.7 trillion budget, which means any upcoming deficit reduction package — at least one that begins to significantly slow the gush of red ink — will require politically dangerous curbs to popular benefit programs, which include Social Security, Medicare, the Medicaid health care program for the poor and disabled, and food stamps.

Neither Obama nor his GOP rivals on Capitol Hill have yet come forward with specific proposals for cutting such benefit programs. Successful efforts to curb the deficit always require active, engaged presidential leadership but Obama’s unwillingness to thus far take chances has deficit hawks discouraged. Obama will release his 2012 budget proposal next month.

“Somebody is going to have to bite the bullet and get this process going,” said Maya MacGuineas of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a bipartisan group that advocates fiscal responsibility. “And that somebody has to be the president.”

Obama has pointedly steered clear of the recommendations of his deficit commissions, which in December called for politically difficult moves such as increasing the Social Security retirement age and reducing future increases in benefits. It also proposed a 15 cents a gallon increase in the gas tax and eliminating or scaling back tax breaks — including the child tax credit, mortgage interest deduction and deduction claimed by employers who provide health insurance — in exchange for rate cuts on corporate and income taxes.

CBO predicts that the deficit will fall to $551 billion by 2015, down to a sustainable 3 percent of the size of the economy.

But under its rules, the CBO assumes that recently-extended cuts in taxes on income, investment and people inheriting large estates will expire in two years. If those tax cuts, and numerous others, are extended, the deficit for that year would be almost three times as large.

Tax revenues, which dropped significantly in 2009 because of the recession, have stabilized. But revenue growth will continue to be constrained because of the slow pace of economic growth and the extension of Bush era tax cuts passed by Congress in December. The CBO projects revenues to be 6 percent higher in 2011 than they were two years ago, which will not keep pace with the growth in spending.

As a share of the economy, tax revenues in 2011 are projected to reach their lowest levels since 1950. The CBO projects that tax revenues will be 14.8 percent of GDP in 2011, which would be 0.1 percentage point lower than in 2009.

“The United States faces daunting economic and budgetary challenges. The economy has struggled to recover from the recent recession, which was triggered by a large decline in house prices and a financial crisis — events unlike anything this country has seen since the Great Depression,” the CBO report says.