Fresh off the heels of the only disappointing 9-4 record in college football, Alabama fans this year must have been hoping to see a new Crimson Tide that looked more like the old ones. After a strong first drive in their season opener against Florida State on Saturday, it seemed like greatness might well have returned. But much like the start of the Belichick era at UNC, those hopes were quickly dashed as the unranked Seminoles swiftly and methodically dismantled the eighth-ranked visitors, en route to a 31-17 beatdown.
Even beyond the pain of the ass-whooping—and an especially stinging one at that, seeing how FSU quarterback Thomas Castellanos cashed every single cent of the check he'd shit-talked his way into writing in the leadup to the game—it is hard for a Bama fan to come out of that game not feeling like they have now watched Rome fall in real time. The thing about last year's losses was that you could explain them away as a new regime's growing pains. But with a full year under his belt and a team full of blue-chippers, Kalen DeBoer's Tide doesn't seem to have grown at all. They lacked energy and fight and grit, new quarterback Ty Simpson looked mostly lost, the receivers and running backs didn't do much of anything, and they got totally manhandled at the line. They looked like a team that had grown too used to success to still try all that hard.
In the moment, the choice of DeBoer, a Pac-12 coach who had achieved great success at the University of Washington, as Nick Saban's heir was received with more than a little head-scratching. College football, if nothing else, is stuck in its calcified beliefs about coasts. The West Coast is all fancy offenses, flashy quarterbacks, and defenses that must scheme out of the fact that they aren't big hitters; meanwhile, back East, the game is all about tough, boring, meat-and-potatoes line-of-scrimmage play and aggressive run games. These tropes persist even though reality is more complicated, which made a Pac-12 coach like DeBoer sitting at the helm of the pride of the SEC such a curious sight. But DeBoer's Huskies were coming off a national title game appearance, led there by current Falcons QB Michael Penix Jr., and the thinking was that if he could recruit championship talent to Washington, imagine what he could do at Alabama.
DeBoer's disappointing introductory season saw Alabama lose to teams like Vanderbilt and Oklahoma, and ended with a truly heinous bowl-game loss to Michigan. The tides (no pun intended) started turning on DeBoer right away, with reports coming in that his team—still stocked with the elite talent Saban had recruited—had lost that Alabama edge and focus.
For the first time in forever, this college football offseason was not centered on Alabama and its championship prospects. All the attention had gone to sexier stories like Arch Manning at Texas or the Big Ten's ongoing run of success. Bama was an afterthought, which might've been a good thing if it meant the program could reset and remember the basic foundation of its success. And yet, many of the same issues that plagued DeBoer's first year were still right there in the Florida State game. To see a team so clearly disengaged for the first game of the season is pretty shocking, and there might be some truth to the fact that DeBoer is not exactly running the tightest ship, with players seemingly going backwards in terms of their development.
This isn't all DeBoer's fault, though. Part of the impetus behind Saban's abrupt exit—beyond going old-man mode about NIL and "kids these days"—was a shrewd assessment of the school's waning advantages. What had separated Alabama from everyone else was their ability to recruit, and the way the team's success was arguably the preeminent showcase for NFL hopefuls. In an era of the transfer portal and NIL, it's much harder to maintain the kinds of rosters overstuffed with five-star talents that Saban rode to championship after championship after championship, and schools with more big-money donors can promise more players bigger paydays than Bama, which, for all its success and prestige, doesn't have the same deep pockets as a Texas or Ohio State. In many ways, then, the current situation was inevitable. Every empire falls eventually, and it is finally happening again to the Tide. Every SEC team on the schedule will now be eagerly sharpening their axes when the Alabama game comes around. Florida State got there first, though, and therefore they get to take home the king's head.
