I'm very happy with the defense. Stuffing a team to singe digits rushing before garbage time is impressive, even against Rice. ST looked very good, aside from the out of bounds kick.
The obvious main concerns are offensive line play and Ewers. Not being able to displace Rice defenders in the run game is a really bad sign. Maybe Flood can shuffle some people around and give Neto more snaps, but I don't think this gets really fixed by next week. Becoming one dimensional and having to rely on Ewers in the Bama game will lead us to the next issue: Ewers can't fucking throw the deep ball. The several lame ducks that he lobbed "downfield" highlighted his poor mechanics and perhaps some panic under pressure. If a full offseason did not translate to any tangible progress for him, then I don't we'll ever see it. I could be wrong, but at this point the odds are really low. Sark is supposed to be very good at coaching QBs... I doubt he forgot how to coach that aspect of the game.
Overall, I worry about Bama's defense figuring out that they don't need to respect the run game, AND they don't need to worry about the deep ball. They'll watch the game film from last year's TCU game and flip "OFF" switch on our offense. Hope I'm wrong.