Mock Kalen DeBoer if you want.
He’s too nice. He doesn’t dress right. He doesn’t fit in. His office looks like a T-Mobile store.
Take your pick. It’s only September of Year 2 at Alabama and he’s already heard it all.
DeBoer deserves to hear something else after the statement victory he earned at Sanford Stadium on Saturday night. Apologies. Big ones. Like, apologies for anyone who assumed that Alabama was about to fork over a Jimbo Fisher-like buyout to a coach who entered the season with a 15-3 mark vs. AP Top 25 teams and a 6-1 mark vs. AP Top 10 teams.
Whoops. That’s now dated. Let’s change that to 16-3 vs. ranked foes and 7-1 vs. AP Top 10 teams. That’s what DeBoer is after leading No. 17 Alabama to a 24-21 win against No. 5 Georgia.
All DeBoer did was hand Georgia its first home loss of the 2020s, which snapped the nation’s longest home win streak at 33 games. Oh, and in case that wasn’t enough, he gave Georgia its first night game loss at Sanford Stadium since 2009. As in, the first term of the Barack Obama administration.
That was a tough pill to swallow for the crowd who wrote DeBoer off and said that he was a dead man walking in 2025. That man is now 1 of 3 coaches with multiple wins against Kirby Smart (H/T Chris Wright). Who are the other 2? Ed Orgeron and a certain Nick Saban. You know, the guy that DeBoer would never be able to live up to.
Time will tell how he handles that and whether those 4 losses to unranked foes in his first 14 games were indeed an ominous sign of things to come. That wasn’t the concern going into Saturday night. The concern was whether his team, which blew out a pair of overmatched foes following the Florida State debacle, had truly righted its Week 1 wrongs.
You could interpret that in a variety of ways. Ryan Williams still dropped what would’ve been a walk-in touchdown, but he made up for it with tough catches in traffic. Alabama still looked vulnerable against Georgia’s rushing attack, but it made up for it with a monumental stuff of Cash Jones on 4th-and-1 in the red zone. Shoot, the Tide offense again cooled off after a fast start by not having a single second-half point, but when Alabama had to have a game-sealing conversion, Ryan Grubb dialed up the perfect 3rd-and-5 call to hit a wide-open Jam Miller in the flat.
Is Alabama perfect? Certainly not. Did it respond like a Saban team would? Absolutely.
But this wasn’t about DeBoer trying to do a Saban impression, despite who the competition was. DeBoer had a bye week to dial up a “backs against the wall” game plan in as hostile of an atmosphere as there is, and he did that. Nothing reflected that more than watching Ty Simpson convert 3rd down after 3rd down in the first half. An 8-for-8 start on 3rd down set the tone for the Alabama offense.
And how much were Grubb and DeBoer feeling themselves? Enough to dial up a screen to 359-pound left tackle Kadyn Proctor.
That’s when we should’ve known it was over.
But as is often the case with Alabama-Georgia games, dominant starts turn into up-for-grabs finishes. If Georgia freshman Talyn Taylor had hauled in a walk-in touchdown pass in the final minutes of the 3rd quarter, Georgia would’ve taken a 28-24 lead and perhaps doesn’t look back. You could also say that if Smart had opted for a game-tying field goal instead of a rushed 4th-and-1 handoff to Jones, perhaps we would’ve gotten an all-or-nothing overtime.
That didn’t happen, though. Instead, Alabama was the team that refused to wilt.
Alabama never trailed on Saturday. Consider that a slight difference from last year’s win against Georgia, which saw the Dawgs erase an 28-0 deficit, but fall victim to Williams and the Tide on some late-game heroics.
We don’t know yet if Saturday will be the high point of Alabama’s season like it was in 2024. Certainly nobody could’ve predicted that Alabama would not only lose the following game to Vanderbilt, but that it would be on the outside of the Playoff picture at 9-3. One shouldn’t assume a specific destiny awaits the Tide, especially with how much the road woes have been an issue under DeBoer. After all, Saturday night’s win in Athens improved the Tide to 3-5 away from home under DeBoer.
But if there is a key difference to point out, it’s perhaps the point that the more level-headed people argued after the dust settled in Week 1. It was that Alabama’s embarrassment came in Week 1 this year as opposed to an early-October funk last year that it could never shake. It was August when Alabama was written off this time, and understandably so. It was a dreadful Week 1 showing in Tallahassee.
Much has changed in the last 4 weeks. For DeBoer, maybe it’ll end up being the type of change that flips the trajectory of his program. To call that his biggest win at Alabama would be an understatement.
As Simpson was being interviewed on by Holly Rowe, the ABC cameras caught DeBoer entering the Sanford Stadium tunnel and holding up his left arm in triumph. One can’t begin to imagine the roller coaster he’s endured in the first month of the season. Surely he and Alabama fans everywhere would prefer that the ride even out a bit.
But at the very least, you can’t mock that showing in Athens.
Connor O'Gara is the senior national columnist for Saturday Down South. He's a member of the Football Writers Association of America. After spending his entire life living in B1G country, he moved to the South in 2015.
