Kalen DeBoer’s second season at Alabama wasn’t exactly a disaster, but in Alabama, “good” has never been good enough. And when your season ends with a historic 38-3 beatdown at the hands of Indiana in the Rose Bowl, people are going to talk. One of those people is former LSU coach Ed Orgeron, who just threw some subtle shade at the current state of Alabama football and, by extension, Kalen DeBoer’s tenure so far.​

“It is different. I gotta say it. Coach [Saban] brought some toughness. And all these coaches are doing very well. But when you played Alabama, man, they were the benchmark.” Orgeron continued, “We knew that we had to beat Alabama and beat Alabama like we did over there. It was the first time in eight years we had beaten him. There were battles, but you know, he set the benchmark in recruiting. He set the benchmark in toughness.”

“I think the SEC has lost a lot of its toughness because of guys like Coach Saban, myself are not in it. We’re hard-nosed coaches. I think that the outlook of it is obvious .” The former LSU head coach didn’t hold back: “Look what Indiana did to Alabama. You’d have never seen that in those days. And when coach Saban was there, you had to be a physical football team in the SEC to compete. And now that element seems like it’s kind of washing away.”

The differences between the two coaches are pretty stark when you look at how they run their programs. Saban was all about afternoon practices in the brutal Alabama heat. He wanted his guys practicing at the hottest time of day to build mental toughness for game conditions. 

DeBoer flips that script entirely. He runs morning practices between 9 and 9:30 a.m. to cultivate discipline. There’s also music at DeBoer’s practices, while Saban preferred just the natural sound of pads popping and coaches yelling. And where Saban spent most of his time locked in with the defensive backs, DeBoer moves around to every position group, letting his assistants coach while he gets a feel for what everyone’s doing. 

The results, though, tell a complicated story. Nick Saban lost to just four unranked teams in 17 years at Alabama. DeBoer’s at 20-8 through two seasons, with an 11-4 mark this year, including that brutal 38-3 Rose Bowl loss to Indiana. Saban’s teams went 35-12 against top-10 opponents during his run and won six national titles built on a foundation of physicality and toughness. DeBoer’s trying to establish his own identity at a place where the bar is set impossibly high. Whether his approach can get Alabama back to that championship level remains the biggest question hanging over the program.

Saban speaks out

Nick Saban’s appearance on the Pat McAfee Show this week gave some interesting perspective on what DeBoer’s actually dealing with. When McAfee asked whether Alabama should’ve hired one of Saban’s former assistants instead, especially since all four coaches who left in the playoff worked under him at some point, Saban didn’t bite.

“I think if somebody was available—I’m not sure anybody was available that they could have maybe gotten to come here,” he said, before adding, “I do think that Kalen DeBoer is a really good coach and doing a good job here.” He pointed out the “tough transition” DeBoer faced with about 26 players hitting the transfer portal when Saban retired, calling it “a lot to overcome for anybody” and noting it “would have been a lot to overcome even for one of the guys that formerly coached for me.”

The reality Saban laid out connects pretty directly to what Orgeron was getting at. “It’s not bad to get in the playoffs and finish, you know, in the final eight, but not the expectation around here, which is tough to live up to sometimes,” Saban acknowledged. That’s the heart of the whole thing. Alabama’s standards aren’t normal, and the roster churn in modern college football makes building a physicality-centric roster way harder than it used to be.

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