FOX Sports' Joel Klatt is high on Kalen DeBoer -- so high that he compared him to Tiger Woods despite not having won anything major as a coach compared to Woods's 15-time major tournament wins -- but is still worried about the Crimson Tide taking a massive step back in his first season as Alabama's head coach.
Ultimately, he predicted that Alabama wouldn't. But it's hard not to note that he does expect a small step back; laying out a potentially overly gaudy goal of the College Football Playoff quarterfinals appearance.
"I didn’t put them in my top-four and while I think that there are two clear teams right now in the SEC that might be better than them in the preseason – Texas and Georgia? I still don’t think that Alabama can go and take a massive step back," Klatt said (h/t On3). "Nor do I think they will take a massive step back. He’s too good, their players are too good and they believe in what they’re doing at Alabama,” Klatt continued. “So, for me, Alabama has got to make the College Football Playoff’s quarterfinals. They have lived rent-free in the top-four in college football for a long time. I can expect a small step back but not give them two steps back.”
Following Nick Saban is a tough ask. Perhaps too tough of an ask with a roster without Caleb Downs, Isaiah Bond, Amari Niblack, and others.
Especially in the wake of a recent revelation about one of Saban's greatest teams.
Will Kalen DeBoer's Alabama Crimson Tide scare opponents like Nick Saban's did?
Manti Te'o made his NFL Network debut and revealed that his Notre Dame teammates were afraid of the physical specimens Alabama offensive linemen DJ Fluker and Chance Warmack were.
“Alabama’s locker room door opens, and they start running out,” Te'o said (h/t AL.com). “I do remember this very vividly. My soon-to-be teammate (with the Chargers) DJ Fluker (6-5, 340) and Chance Warmack (6-2, 323) coming running out of the locker room with their jerseys up. Their bellies out, and they had their ‘4s’ up (four fingers on each hand). DJ going by saying, ‘Womp, womp.’
“And I vividly remember the silence behind me, and I kinda glanced at my teammates behind me and the eyes on them. They were so large. I knew at that point, ‘Alright this is gonna be a long day.’”
Will DeBoer's Tide inspire the same fear?
Having been at the Hank Crisp Indoor Facility at the same time as Kadyn Proctor and Fluker, in this writer's opinion, it's fair to say that the size and brute strength are not all too dissimilar in Tuscaloosa.
But the attitude Saban instilled in his guys, the meanness, the want to run up the score and punish whoever's on the field, was the difference. Does DeBoer have that in him?