It wasn’t the season Kalen DeBoer and the Alabama Crimson Tide were hoping for in the first campaign of the post-Nick Saban era.
Of course, it was always going to be hard to replace Saban. He’s arguably the best college football head coach of all time, so even DeBoer — who brims with potential as a young head coach — was going to struggle to make everyone in Tuscaloosa happy.
Anything short of a College Football Playoff National Championship would have been short of the standard, but Alabama finished 9-3 in the regular season and then lost to Michigan in the ReliaQuest Bowl, 19-13.
That’s a tough debut, especially considering the bowl game loss, and former Alabama quarterback turned ESPN college football commentator Greg McElroy recently graded DeBoer’s first season in Tuscaloosa in a similarly tough manner.
He graded college football’s first-year head coaches and gave DeBoer a B minus.
“There were some challenges, some adjustments, some roster tinkering that were very difficult. I think that they were remarkably inconsistent from start to finish, almost on a week-to-week basis. You’d watch him, you’d say, ‘Wow, that that’s the way it’s supposed to look.’ And then you’d watch and be like, ‘My goodness, what was that?’ There were levels of inconsistency that were really hard to wrap your head around,” McElroy said on his video podcast (h/t On3).
McElroy mentioned that the bowl game loss to Michigan really skewed the grade toward the B-, and that makes sense. Alabama was a borderline CFP team and many thought the Tide should have made it considering wins over No. 2 Georgia, No. 21 Missouri and No. 15 LSU on the season, but the Tide were proven to be somewhat fraudulent in the loss to the Wolverines.
“Had he won the bowl game against Michigan, I think this could have taken this grade and to a different level,” McElroy said.
