It is far too soon to tell whether Kalen DeBoer is going to be a good enough football coach for Alabama, but he’s going to do wonders for the state’s diamond-producing industry. Every Saturday in the fall under DeBoer’s watch, there are going to be enough clenched fists, jaws and other orifices within a 300-mile radius of Tuscaloosa to make De Beers consider a rebrand.
That’s just how DeBoer rolls. It’s always going to be a high-wire act. Through five games as Nick Saban’s replacement, we are seeing all the same stuff – good and bad – that we saw from DeBoer’s teams at Washington.
Bold playcalling that borders on reckless at times. Receivers making video game plays down the field. Defense that is often, um, questionable. And games that resemble the last few laps of the Indy 500 when everyone is exhausted and the drivers just throw all strategy out the window and start passing each other, hoping that they end up in front when the finish line comes.
DeBoer won eight football games that way last year at Washington, and it often didn’t matter how good or bad the competition was. But it was enough to get the Huskies to the national championship game, which earned DeBoer an offer to replace Saban at college football’s preeminent program.
But there’s a little thing called regression to the mean, and it hits like a bout of food poisoning that gets you out of bed in the middle of the night and makes you never want to eat another meal in your life.
When you live as dangerously as DeBoer has done at both Washington and Alabama, you will eventually end up bent over a toilet. For Alabama fans who don’t remember much before Saban arrived in 2007, violent puking might even be preferable to what they watched Saturday in a 40-35 loss to Vanderbilt.
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What does this result, and the first half of DeBoer’s debut season, say about Alabama?
It says that while the Crimson Tide is still good, it’s the kind of good that a lot of programs can achieve. More reminiscent of those fun, flawed and ultimately beatable Lincoln Riley teams at Oklahoma than the impenetrable Alabama run that lasted more than a decade under Saban.
The reality is – and of course it’s unfair to compare anyone to the greatest of all time – Saban never had a loss this bad in any of his 17 seasons. And, yes, that includes the infamous Louisiana-Monroe game in 2007.
The context of that game was Saban’s first season when the program was in pretty bad shape, had no expectations and the team had pretty much mentally checked out in mid-November. This was an Alabama team ranked No. 2 and coming off an epic win over Georgia, which took the familiar DeBoer route: Up 28-0, down 34-33, then back in front on a 75-yard touchdown with a little more than two minutes to go.
Does he know that Alabama fans can’t take this kind of cardiac abuse? It’s not even funny and cute when they win. But when they lose? When they’re just another good team in a conference full of good teams that has a near-equal chance of winning or losing on any given Saturday?
Sure, it’s not good to lose to Vandy for the first time since 1984. But the way Alabama has been playing defensively this season, it could have been anyone. And that’s not going to fly. It didn’t really work for any Alabama coach before Saban, and it sure as heck isn’t going to work for one after him. As great as the job is, the overwhelming freak-out that is coming for DeBoer this week will perfectly illustrate why so many people in college football thought anyone following Saban was setting themselves up for failure.
Alabama’s two-week whiplash against Georgia and Vandy suggests this is going to be a wild season with a lot more unexpected results as we head toward the first 12-team playoff.
But DeBoer was hired largely because last year it seemed like he couldn’t lose. Was his absurd record in one-score games part of some secret winning sauce, or was it just an unsustainable run of luck that Alabama will pay the price for?
Let’s be honest. Finding out is going to be torture for Alabama fans. That’s why they’re No. 1 in the Misery Index, a weekly ranking of which fan bases are feeling the most angst.
Oklahoma State: A big reason Mike Gundy has lasted nearly two decades in Stillwater is that the truly bad stretches of football have been few and far between. Before this year, Gundy has experienced a three-game losing streak just four times in his career. But this season’s slump looks like it might be headed toward calamity after a 38-14 loss at home to West Virginia. The Cowboys were completely depantsed in this one, as West Virginia piled up a 558-227 edge in yards and averaged a ridiculous six yards per rush on 65 attempts. Oklahoma State is now 0-3 in the Big 12 and has been out-scored by a cumulative total of 102-53.
Missouri: Ranked No. 11 in the preseason based mostly on a friendly schedule and the carryover hype from last year’s 11-2 record, this team has done nothing on the field to justify any College Football Playoff talk much less a national ranking. In fact, after an uncompetitive 41-10 loss at Texas A&M, the Tigers look like one of the season’s biggest flops. Even worse, A&M coach Mike Elko accused Missouri of faking their own bulletin board material. It emanated from a social media post from Missouri receiver Theo Wease, who arrived at his College Station hotel to find a Texas A&M blanket and note purportedly from Aggies corner Mike Lee that said, “Get used to this blanket. It will be real tomorrow.” Elko said the “gift” did not come from Lee or anyone at Texas A&M and suggested it was an inside job by Drinkwitz to pump up his own player. If true, it would be the most interesting thing about Missouri’s season so far.
Purdue: Ryan Walters has always been a fast climber, a hotshot assistant who was 30 years old when he got his first defensive coordinator job, earned almost universal praise for his work at two schools and then landed as a head coach in the Big Ten at 37. It hasn’t gone particularly well. How does someone who has done nothing but succeed handle a failure of this magnitude and with this much at stake for his career? Walters is 5-12 at Purdue, but Year 2 has been a major backslide. After a putrid 52-6 loss to Wisconsin, Purdue is 1-4 and has been outscored 184-44 by FBS opponents. Though Purdue fans have been here before - being reminded of the Darrell Hazell years isn’t a good thing – this program has had a pretty solid track record overall since the late 1990s. It can’t afford and shouldn’t tolerate sliding to the bottom of the conference – especially as rival Indiana celebrates a 6-0 start under first-year coach Curt Cignetti.
Alabama-Birmingham: The ocean of empty seats at three-year old Protective Stadium said it all Saturday. The Blazers fan base has checked out on Trent Dilfer, whose poor performance is only matched by his arrogance in alienating a group of people that have tolerated a lot of bad football over the years. A week after Dilfer’s tone deaf “It’s not like this is freakin’ Alabama” comment – as if UAB fans needed to be reminded of that – his team didn’t do much to soothe the controversy in a 71-20 loss to Tulane.
Though Dilfer apologized – sort of – during the pre-game coaches show and claimed that fans took it the wrong way, it’s hard to see this marriage lasting too much longer. This isn’t the old UAB. They’ve got a new stadium and practice facility. They’ve got a fan base that wants to win. They should be one of the better programs in the American Athletic. Instead, both Dilfer and athletics director Mark Ingram are going to be on the hot seat, and it’s got to be infuriating for UAB fans because it was so unnecessary.
Worse than just a run-of-the-mill coaching failure, Dilfer was an unprepared celebrity dropped into a college program despite having no credentials or experience to suggest that he could do the job. Sure, he was an NFL quarterback and a TV commentator, but his coaching experience was limited to a few years at a private high school in Nashville – and it shows.
Southern California: Will Trojans fans give the program a mulligan for its first go-round in the Big Ten? We’re about to find out because this season has quickly devolved from promising to whelming to massively underwhelming. Whatever toughness threshold USC seemed to have crossed in its season-opening win over LSU seems irrelevant now after melting down late twice in the last three weeks. First it was giving up an 89-yard touchdown drive to lose at Michigan. Now it's a fourth-quarter no-show against Minnesota, which turned on a Miller Moss interception with 10 minutes left when USC was poised to take a two-score lead. Instead, the Gophers’ 24-17 win leaves USC at 3-2. But the more alarming stat is that Lincoln Riley has lost seven of his last 12 games.
TCU: The further we get from the 2022 season, the more surreal it will seem that the Horned Frogs played for a national championship under Sonny Dykes. Has any program squandered momentum so quickly and dramatically after appearing on the sport’s biggest stage? A 30-19 loss at home to Houston, which had previously looked like the Big 12’s worst team, leaves TCU at 3-3. After the game, Dykes was at a loss to explain it and said he needed to do a better job of getting the team excited to play. Has the culture turned complacent that quickly?
East Carolina: It’s stunning how often the Pirates have appeared here the past few years, but it’s also appropriate. This used to be one of college football’s giant-killing programs with a great fan base and a long tradition of winning games. But the reality is that East Carolina hasn’t been that program for a decade and nobody can really explain why. Even coach Mike Houston, who once seemed like a slam dunk hire after winning an Championship Subdivision national title at James Madison, has floundered during his five-year stint. After ECU’s 55-24 loss to Charlotte, Houston has won just five of his last 18 games and the clamor for change is beginning.
Troy: Here’s a trend to keep an eye on in the transfer portal era. In the past, winning Group of Five programs had a chance to keep the momentum going even if they lost their coach to a bigger school. But now, it’s a whole lot harder. Jon Sumrall won 23 of 27 games at Troy and took a better-paying job at Tulane, which nobody would hold against him. But 20 players transferred out after he left, including a few to Tulane and several others who went to power conference programs. Now, just like that, Troy is 1-5 after a 38-17 loss to Texas State. Is it better to have these dramatic ups and downs or to just be pretty good and have nobody show much interest in hiring your up-and-coming coach?
Kennesaw State: A newcomer to the FBS level, they’re just not ready for this. They may not be ready for anything. The Owls were once one of the top FCS programs. Now they’re 0-5 after a 39-point loss to Jacksonville State and almost certainly the worst team in Conference USA, which convinced Kennesaw State to join after they lost a bunch of teams in conference realignment. As of now, the Owls are doing nothing in this division other than diluting the product and handing out easy Ws.
(This story was updated to change a video.)
