Kalen is calling as Alabama football begins its uncertain new era.
Matt Zemek, 16powers.com.
Bear Bryant was the defining college football coach for the men of his time. He cast a very long shadow over the University of Alabama, but it’s important to remember – when accounting for the full career of The Bear, not just the Tuscaloosa years – that he won big at Kentucky and turned around Texas A&M before lifting Alabama to great heights. Why mention that point about The Bear? It shows that Bryant had definitively proved himself as a head coach before Alabama welcomed him home. It’s not as though the Tide were making some wild riverboat bet, a low-percentage play with a lot of wishful thinking. No, they were getting a proven guy who turned out to be better than they ever could have imagined.
It was much the same with Nick Saban when Alabama hired him nearly two decades ago. Saban did take a little time to finally figure out the art of college head coaching (he never solved the NFL, unlike Pete Carroll of USC), but once Saban understood how to run a top-tier college program, he was money in the bank for the school which hired him. Saban learned how to be great at LSU, where he tapped into the school’s enormous in-state talent reserves and built a high-level winner which captured the SEC championship in 2001 and then took the next step to national title glory in 2003.
When Alabama hired Saban, it was not a crazy gamble. It was the smart, percentage play. Alabama got very lucky that then-West Virginia coach Rich Rodriguez never landed in Tuscaloosa. Saban always made sense as the better choice. History confirms that.
Alabama’s biggest decisions over the course of nearly 70 years – hiring The Bear after the 1957 season and then hiring Saban after the 2006 season – were not Hail Mary passes. They were responsible and informed choices.
Kalen DeBoer fits that same mold. It doesn’t guarantee that he will succeed on a massive scale in his new home, but it does mean that Alabama did as well as it reasonably could once Saban announced his retirement from coaching and brought an end to a luminously prosperous era.
Kalen DeBoer inherited a total mess at Washington. The Huskies were 4-8 in 2021. Head coach Jimmy Lake was a total train wreck. He was a great defensive coordinator for former UW head coach Chris Petersen, but we all know that coordinators and head coaches are two very different things. Lake had no clue of how to teach offense or recruit offense. DeBoer had to come in and build an offense from scratch. He reunited with a quarterback he had coached at Indiana. His name: Michael Penix. The quarterback and the coach worked well together. They were good for each other. Yet, no one could have predicted just how successful this pairing would be in Seattle.
Washington won 11 games in 2022 – a seven-game improvement from 2021’s nightmare – complete with high-end wins away from home against Oregon and then against Texas in the Alamo Bowl. As good as 2022 was, however, 2023 took Washington to the very top tier of the sport. The Huskies won 14 straight games. They swept Oregon. They beat Texas in a bowl game for the second straight season. They marched all the way to the College Football Playoff National Championship Game. Michigan was conclusively better, but the Huskies came as close as they could to the national title without actually winning it. The 2023 season marked the closest Washington came to a national championship since it split the 1991 national title with Miami.
Kalen DeBoer took a proud and prominent program from total misery (4-8) to elite status (14-1, national runner-up) in two years.
Alabama football historians will recognize the parallel between DeBoer and another coaching hire the Tide made just over 20 years ago. Mike Price took little ol’ Washington State to two Rose Bowls in half a decade. His 2002 Washington State team won the Pac-10 championship and defeated Pete Carroll’s first really good USC team in head-to-head combat. Wazzu made the 2003 Rose Bowl and had established itself as a major player in the sport. When Alabama coach Dennis Franchione bolted for Texas A&M after the 2002 season, Alabama zeroed in on Price. It wasn’t a wild gamble; Price had proven himself as a head coach in much the same way DeBoer has done in the Pacific Northwest.
We all know what happened next: a lap dance in Pensacola, Florida, blew up Price’s Bama tenure before it ever had a chance to begin. Kalen DeBoer gives all of us a chance to finally see what it’s like for a hugely successful Pac-12 head coach from the Northwest to plant his flag in Tuscaloosa and get to work. We never got to see this story with Mike Price, but now DeBoer gives us a second chance to study this kind of move.
If there is a central question surrounding Kalen DeBoer, it is simply this: Can he develop a quarterback other than Michael Penix? The question might imply skepticism, but it’s merely a reflection of the reality that Penix and DeBoer had such great chemistry – at two different schools – that a fresh relationship must now be established with Jalen Milroe. DeBoer is an accomplished coach, and Milroe is a luminous, dynamic athlete. The two should be able to make it work. However, when one coach has so much experience with one quarterback in a four-year span, as we have seen with DeBoer and Penix, even an elite coach might not have the same hand-in-glove fit with the next quarterback who comes along. It’s not a point of criticism, only the reality that DeBoer and Penix are tied so closely together that the DeBoer-Milroe dynamic is unknowable at this point. We’ll just have to wait and see how these competitors collaborate against a demanding SEC schedule which contains games against Georgia, Tennessee, Missouri, LSU, and Oklahoma.
SEC football is not for the faint of heart. Kalen DeBoer does have the credentials as he takes over for Nick Saban. The college football world is watching as a man with formidable skills tries to create a track record and a story which are worthy of the Alabama name.
