Alabama could not have landed a more impressive coach to succeed the retiring Nick Saban than Washington’s Kalen DeBoer, who sports a career 104-12 record dating to his days at NAIA Sioux Falls, and who comes fresh off of leading the Huskies to a 21-game winning streak and a national championship game appearance.
Now, all DeBoer needs to do to continue his stratospheric rise is replicate the success of the greatest coach in the history of the sport — or get run off within a few years for not being Nick Saban.
In a vacuum, leaving a program like Washington — nationally respected but not quite a blue blood — for Alabama — a program with 13 poll-era national championships, a rabid fan base and seemingly unlimited football resources — seems like a no-brainer for DeBoer. But being the guy who comes immediately after Saban, who delivered the school six of those national titles, seems like a near-impossible position, no matter how much they’re paying the guy.
The hit rate of coaches replacing revered legends in this sport is … not great.
The last time Alabama went through this, when six-time national champion Bear Bryant retired in 1982, the school hired New York Giants head coach and former Bryant player Ray Perkins.
He stayed for four seasons, going 32-15-1, before hightailing back to the NFL with the Tampa Bay Buccaneers.
The high point came in his final season, when Alabama went 10-3 and finished ninth in the country.
But that was a much different time. Perkins went 5-6 in his second season but was not in danger of losing his job. If DeBoer makes the mistake of going 5-7 in his second season, he might not make it to Year 3.
Other examples include Frank Solich, who ascended to the Nebraska head coaching job following Tom Osborne’s retirement upon winning his third national championship in four years.
Solich took the Huskers to the BCS championship game in his third season, finished in the Top 25 five times in six seasons — and got fired after slipping to 7-7 and 9-3 in his final two years.
Or Bob Davie, who succeeded national champion Lou Holtz at Notre Dame. He was on the hot seat as soon as his first season, a 7-6 campaign, and ultimately fired after a 5-6 finish in his fifth. He went into broadcasting for a decade before resurfacing at New Mexico.
Or Ron Zook, a relative unknown when Florida hired him to replace Steve Spurrier. He failed to reach nine wins in his first two seasons and was gone before the end of the third.
Heck, look at the perilous state of Ohio State’s Ryan Day, who took over for national champion Urban Meyer. Day led the Buckeyes to the Playoff in his first season and the national title game the next.
As of this moment, he’s 39-3 in Big Ten play. But because those three losses have come in the past three seasons to hated Michigan, a large chunk of Ohio State’s fan base would gladly see him gone. If he loses again next season, he may well be.
The good news for DeBoer is he comes in with a far greater track record than any of those recent examples, all of whom were getting their first head-coaching jobs. All coaching hires come with a degree of risk, but DeBoer is the furthest thing from a gamble. The guy can flat win. If anything, he should come in and have immediate success, much like Day did at Ohio State.
Unlike at Washington, where the Huskies had gone 4-8 the year prior to his arrival, Saban is leaving behind one of the most talented rosters in the sport. And DeBoer, who helped turn Michael Penix Jr. into a Heisman runner-up, will get to coach Jalen Milroe, who finished sixth in that award’s voting last season. No one should be surprised if DeBoer’s first Alabama team lands solidly in the field of the first 12-team Playoff.
Problem is, Saban set such a high bar that simply making the Playoff is the bare minimum. He missed it only twice in 10 seasons — when the field was just four. Over Saban’s last four seasons, he won a national title in 2020, played for another in ’21, missed the CFP but still went 11-2 in ’22 and knocked off No. 1 Georgia in the SEC Championship Game and took Michigan to overtime in the semifinals in 2023.
The expectation for DeBoer will be the one Saban set: winning national championships. As such, the best thing he could do is check that box straight away in Year 1, such that Tide fans can rest easier knowing he has the chops to do it.
Because each year that goes by without a new title will only ramp up the volume of angry Finebaum callers.
