Kalen DeBoer is the man to replace Nick Saban.

Imagine telling an Alabama fan that 4 years ago. It’s hard to do so, because it’s hard to fully grasp how meteoric a rise DeBoer has enjoyed since getting his first crack at an FBS head coaching job. After winning just about everything at the NAIA level, DeBoer jumped to the FBS as an assistant and bounced around to various jobs.

In 2020, he got the head coaching gig at Fresno State. In 2022, he got the head coaching gig at Washington. Now, in the early days of 2024, DeBoer is taking over one of the most valuable sports properties in the world. Alabama breeds first-round NFL Draft picks. You can’t walk through the football facilities without bumping into a national championship trophy.

Nick Saban restored Alabama to complete and utter dominance. The Crimson Tide have won 10 games or more in each of the past 16 seasons. But he retired Wednesday, thrusting Alabama into a coaching search of extreme importance.

On Friday, that coaching search ended in Seattle. Washington reportedly made a strong push to retain DeBoer, who just signed an extension last year. According to multiple reports, new UW athletic director Troy Dannen offered to double DeBoer’s $4.2 million salary.

But Alabama is Alabama.

And to a winner like DeBoer, there’s no greater challenge.

Here are 5 things to know about Alabama’s new head football coach:

DeBoer wins

In a period of transition, and coming off a 4-8 season, maybe the 2020 season at Fresno State is one of DeBoer’s most impressive campaigns.

Fresno State went 3-3 that year. They lost the first game, then won 3 straight. In California, where COVID-related restrictions were tougher than just about anywhere else in the country, football was a challenge. But DeBoer set the stage for what was to come. Fresno State won 9 games in 2021 and DeBoer earned himself a Power 5 opportunity.

He brought 6 assistants from Fresno with him to UW, which had gone 4-8 the year prior.

In Year 1, Washington went 11-2. The Huskies beat Oregon — the biggest game of their season — after losing 15 of the previous 17 games in the series. They won the Apple Cup matchup with Washington State. They toppled 4 ranked opponents in total and closed out the season with 7 consecutive wins.

In 2023, Washington extended that winning streak to 21 games. Washington went 12-0 in the regular season. It beat Oregon to win the Pac-12 Championship. Then it beat Texas to win the Sugar Bowl in the CFP semifinal.

DeBoer leaves Washington with a 25-3 record. He went 14-0 at home. He went 10-1 in games against ranked opponents.

As an FBS head coach, DeBoer is 37-9.

As a college football head coach, he is 104-12. He went 67-3 in 5 years with Sioux Falls. In his first year, the Cougars went 11-2. In Year 2, they went 14-0 to win a national title. In Year 4, they went 14-0 to win a national title. In Year 5, they went 15-0 to win a national title. Over DeBoer’s final 4 years with the program, they lost 1 game, and that was in the 2007 NAIA national championship.

Sometimes football is just football. And we’ve seen time and time again in recent years that knowing how to win is a skill. Some have it. Some just don’t. DeBoer knows how to win. And he knows how to convince his teams they can do it at the highest levels.

DeBoer has no experience in the South

This is the point that likely gives Alabama fans pause.

DeBoer played wide receiver for Sioux Falls in college. He graduated and immediately took over as the program’s wide receivers coach. After 2 seasons as a high school assistant in South Dakota, he spent 4 years as the Sioux Falls offensive coordinator. In 2010, he became the OC at Southern Illinois.

From there, he bounced between OC jobs at Eastern Michigan (2014-16), Fresno State (2017-18), and Indiana (2019) before taking over the Fresno program.

DeBoer is a 4-time AFCA Coach of the Year (3 at the NAIA level) and a 2-time Pac-12 Coach of the Year. It’s hard to argue with his track record to this point. But it’s also fair to point out that football is a bit different in the SEC.

Recruiting is hotter. Wins mean more. Losses cost more. The spotlight can break some. Other coaches who were linked to the Alabama job had some kind of Alabama connection or some kind of foothold in the region. Dan Lanning and Steve Sarkisian were on Saban’s staffs at various points. Mike Norvell has set up shop in Florida. Going all-in on DeBoer is betting on him just simply being one of the best coaches in the field right now and being able to figure out the rest of it.

It’s a bet that could absolutely pay off for the Crimson Tide! But it’s a gamble, nonetheless.

DeBoer is an offense-first kind of coach

Don’t think Lincoln Riley. We don’t want to trigger any gag reflexes here. But DeBoer has built his career on the offensive side of the football. And he has collaborated wonderfully with UW offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb for most of that career.

Washington’s offense was a joy to watch over the past 2 seasons. The Huskies stacked formations and used a flurry of pre-snap movement to try and force a defense to tip its hand. UW’s offensive braintrust puts coverages at odds with their defensive principles and then attacks the breakdowns.

Expect a ton of verticality. When the run game got rolling in the second half of the 2023 season, play-action was lethal.

Dan Casey put together a great thread on some of the concepts Alabama fans can look for here.

They put their best players in the best positions. The 3-headed receiver rotation of Rome Odunze, Ja’Lynn Polk, and Jalen McMillan terrified opposing coordinators — something Alabama’s receiving corps didn’t do in 2023. Odunze, a contested-catch machine, posted the best receiving season in school history in 2023. McMillan was a 1,000-yard receiver alongside Odunze in 2022, and when he spent the better part of the 2023 season injured, Polk stepped in to produce a 1,000-yard campaign.

In 2023, UW quarterback Michael Penix Jr. led the nation in throws that traveled more than 20 yards downfield. And he did so by a wide margin — 20 attempts more than the No. 2 guy. In 2022, Penix finished with the 4th-most deep throws.

Of course, it helps when you have the talent to fit the system. Penix, the lefty who went to NYC as a Heisman finalist, could hit every throw on the field. And he had players in Odunze and Polk who could go up and make contested catches. In 1-on-1 passing situations, DeBoer and his offensive staff had more than enough confidence in their personnel to put the ball in the air.

Washington threw a pass on 3rd down late to seal a win over Oregon State this season. Penix threw a “go get it” kind of ball to Odunze to move the sticks and ice the game. Others might have run the ball.

On a 4th down from their own side of the 50 in a tie game against Washington State, Washington dialed up an option reverse and ran Odunze around the end to move the chains and set up an eventual game-winning field goal.

At his heart, DeBoer wants to embolden his offense to go win the football game. He’s aggressive — but not reckless — and puts his teams in positions to decide games for themselves.

DeBoer comes with recruiting questions

Amidst a run to the College Football Playoff, Washington managed to put together a recruiting class that only ranked 36th nationally. (That class will likely change now that DeBoer is gone.)

In 2023, off an 11-win season that served as a breakthrough, Washington’s recruiting class ranked 26th nationally.

In 2022, Washington’s recruiting class ranked 95th nationally. Now, that was a transition class with only 10 commits, and those never look good in retrospect. The transfer class was ranked 24th in the country and Penix Jr. was viewed as a 3-star transfer.

There have been some major hits. Parker Brailsford, a 3-star 2022 signee, started at center for the Joe Moore Award-winning offensive line. UW’s coaching staff was extremely high on Folsom (Calif.) High 4-star quarterback Austin Mack, who reclassified from the 2024 class to enroll in the 2023 cycle and join the program a year early.

In 5 classes, DeBoer has leaned heavily on California. The state has produced 56 of the 86 high school recruits (65%) who have committed to play for DeBoer at Fresno State or Washington.

Alabama can recruit wherever it wants. That’s not the point. But how does DeBoer handle the balance of portal and high school recruiting? He’ll have drastically expanded resources from an NIL standpoint at Alabama. The recruiting operation will be better staffed and better funded.

Classes outside the Top 25 won’t be acceptable at Alabama. Classes outside the top 10 probably won’t even be acceptable. Alabama signed the 12th-ranked class in 2007, according to 247Sports. There has not been a signing class since that ranked lower than 5th in the 247 class rankings. Typically, Saban’s classes ranked No. 1 or No. 2.

It has to be a serious priority. With DeBoer moving around in recent years, leaning more on the transfer portal to set himself up made sense. We’ll get a real sense of his recruiting chops at Alabama, where he shouldn’t need to overhaul a roster to win games right away.

DeBoer inspires loyalty

The Washington coaching staff talked a lot about culture in the run up to the national championship. Players took a chance on DeBoer. After it worked in Year 1, assistants turned down opportunities to leave to stay with DeBoer. Grubb was among them, having notably garnered interest from Alabama.

“I think when you’re looking at wherever you’re working, you want to be somewhere where, No. 1, you feel like you can make an impact, where you can be yourself. And those were things that were important to me,” Grubb said. “My style of offense and the things I wanted to accomplish, I didn’t want a bunch of restrictions on that. And I wanted to be able to be more collaborative with the people I was going to be with and have more control of the situation. I feel like I do have a lot of input with what happens with the program.”

Penix played for DeBoer in 2019 when they were at Indiana. When he went into the transfer portal ahead of the 2022 season, it was basically Washington all the way.

“He picked up and moved all the way across the country,” DeBoer said of Penix after the CFP title loss to Michigan. “And I just can’t tell you how much that means to me to have that trust from someone like Michael because this was his last crack at it.

“It was a time where we all know his story. It was kind of at that point where it was kind of do or die. And I knew in my mind what he was made of. I knew what he was capable of, and now it’s just a matter of bringing it all together. And I can’t tell you how much it means that he had that trust in me.”

Players preached culture throughout the season. Washington didn’t have a player drafted in the 2023 NFL Draft and it got clowned by some on social media for it. But that was because anyone who could have been drafted came back to chase a title. They spent all of 2023 talking about competing for a national championship.

And then they did it. That culture produced results.

This sort of goes hand-in-hand with the recruiting concerns. Players are going to transfer. NIL offers are going to come in. College football players today have no shortage of options, and the grass almost always looks greener. Can DeBoer build the same kind of environment at Alabama where his assistants will be more in demand and his players will have larger stages?

Can he build a program that is rooted in development the same kind of way Saban’s was for so many years?