The Alabama Crimson Tide is no longer the SEC's primary plotline in a given season under Kalen DeBoer. That main-character narrative, to the College Football-viewing public, anyway, left Tuscaloosa on January 10, 2024, when Nick Saban retired as the team's head coach.
As FOX Sports' Joel Klatt says, the Tide are the third team he thinks about, behind the Georgia Bulldogs and Texas Longhorns, when it comes to the "It Just Means More" conference. Klatt doesn't see Alabama ever heading back in the opposite direction under DeBoer.
“We all just assume that this program is going to be just fine and they’ll be great. But, the reality is that they have quickly descended into a place that, when I think about their conference, I don’t think about them initially, and I don’t even think about them in the top three,” Klatt said on The Joel Klatt Show. “When I think about the SEC, I immediately think of Georgia and Texas and, oh, by the way, Alabama.
“… They are on a trajectory that is down, and I don’t think that that is going to stop. They have to level out at some point in order to start going back up. But, I don’t sense that moment of them leveling out. I think that win against Georgia on the road last year was fantastic. There’s no doubt. But, man, I don’t see this team turning it around. … I don’t love what’s going on down there.”
Could Alabama replace Kalen DeBoer with Lane Kiffin?
Lane Kiffin created a mortal enemy in the Ole Miss Rebels with the way he handled his departure to the LSU Tigers this offseason. One of the ways to try to make it right could be to sabotage LSU in an even more unfathomable fashion and leave Baton Rouge within a year to become the Tide's next head coach.
The Athletic's Stewart Mandel didn't sound overly optimistic that it would happen, but left it open as a possibility that it perhaps could. With Kiffin, that sneaking suspicion of job-hunting to a supposed upgrade always has credence.
It's not as though Kiffin will ever truly be forgiven in Oxford. Still, if he made the Rebs look worse than the Tigers by leaving them even higher and drier, he would maybe no longer be Public Enemy No. 1 in the Sip.
He'd just be that in Louisiana. If he wants Alabama as much as he's made it seem in past years, that's a risk he'd clearly have no problem taking after what we witnessed in November.