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Of all the things we learned about new Alabama football coach Kalen DeBoer in the last week, a nugget he shared during his formal introduction Saturday in Tuscaloosa stands out.
He said he had never met Nick Saban or Greg Byrne before Saban announced his retirement last Wednesday afternoon and Byrne got on a plane headed west in search of Saban’s successor.
If you have any sense of Crimson Tide history, you realize just how extraordinary this fun fact is. There was a time when it would’ve disqualified a man from an Alabama football coaching search from the start.
Byrne found his man about as far away as possible in every conceivable way. If that outside-the-box approach works as well with DeBoer as it has with Nate Oats, given the historical ceiling of Alabama football relative to Alabama basketball, they’ll be adding a statue to the Walk of Champions in the near future.
Make no mistake. That’s the standard. That’s what Alabama football has proved it can do, from 1925 to 2020, when it combines the power of the brand with the leadership of the right man in charge.
By that measure, the program is 5 for 13 in hiring coaches destined to win it all since tapping Vanderbilt assistant Wallace Wade in 1923; 3 for 9 since calling Bear Bryant home in 1958; 2 for 8 since Bryant retired. That drop in the batting average combined with the chaotic present and uncertain future of the sport makes DeBoer’s challenge all the greater.
Will his bronze likeness be next in line alongside Saban, Gene Stallings, Bryant, Frank Thomas and Wade? It will if a little-known aspect of Crimson Tide history repeats itself.
DeBoer arrives with a ridiculous career winning percentage of .897 in nine years as a college head coach. Take away his 67-3 mark in five years at NAIA Sioux Falls, and that percentage drops to an impressive .804 over two seasons each at Washington and Fresno State.
Now do the math that puts metrics behind the historic power of the Alabama brand. From Bryant to Saban, Alabama has had eight head football coaches who actually coached an official game in Bryant-Denny Stadium. Seven of those eight coaches had a higher winning percentage at Alabama than they did at their other college and NFL stops combined.
If DeBoer continues that trend, he’ll be closer to perfect than Saban. Which is, of course, close to impossible.
Saban didn’t become the GOAT until after deplaning in T-town. In 166 games as a head coach with Toledo, Michigan State, LSU and the Miami Dolphins, he won a solid 64 percent of his games. In 235 games over the last 17 years at Alabama, he won an almost unfathomable 88 percent of his games.
The Bama Bounce has applied to coaches with a vast disparity in their resumes. Stallings is the most extreme example. He lost 29 more games than he won as a head coach with Texas A&M and the NFL’s St. Louis/Phoenix Cardinals, but the day he was introduced in Tuscaloosa, Paul Bryant Jr. whispered in his ear, “This is what Papa would’ve wanted.”
Indeed. With Alabama, Stallings stood tall in the Bear’s still-imposing shadow, went 70-16-1 and won the school’s only national championship in the 24 years between Bryant and Saban.
Strangely enough, the exception to the Bama Bounce was Mike DuBose. He had never been a college head coach before leaving Alabama with a 24-23 record, one SEC title and a whopper of an NCAA investigation. He returned to the sideline as a college head coach years later at Division III Millsaps, where he went 33-10 with four conference titles in four seasons.
As always, past performance is no guarantee of future success. Alabama hasn’t hired consecutive coaches who would win big rings since Wade and Thomas before World War II. The powers that be got it wrong four times between Stallings and Saban, and yes, we will count Mike Price in that number.
DeBoer has the unique advantage of taking over a Tide program at close to the peak of its powers with the wisdom of Saban a short stroll away in his new office at the stadium – which should add his name in some way very soon.
But there are disadvantages as well. DeBoer’s lack of recruiting experience in the Deep South and his lack of recruiting success at anywhere near the level Alabama has come to expect under Saban are obvious concerns. The offensive staff he’s assembling appears to be first-rate, but given that his expertise lies on that side of the ball, his choice for defensive coordinator will be critical.
Will it all work the way Alabama demands? Given his relatively short tenure as an FBS head coach, no one can say for sure. So let’s say this about 49-year-old Kalen DeBoer. He seems to have the right stuff for this extraordinary moment in time, but he’s walking into the toughest job in college football history following the best there ever was. Good luck to him.
