Alabama has spent the last two seasons trying to prove it can move forward without Nick Saban, but Josh Pate says the program has now reached the point where the excuses are gone.
On “Josh Pate’s College Football Show,” Pate said the Crimson Tide are officially in a prove-it stretch under Kalen DeBoer, with the Saban era finally fading into the background.
"Alabama is on the clock," Pate said. "This is totally fair.
They feel kind of like they are emerging from the Nick Saban shadow. This is the year where you'll turn Alabama on, and there's very, very little remnant of Nick Saban.
By and large, Nick Saban is now history."
That reality has been building since Saban’s surprise retirement after the 2023 season. His 17-year run in Tuscaloosa produced a 206-29 record and six national championships, and DeBoer inherited one of the heaviest jobs in college football.
When Alabama hired DeBoer, the reaction around the country was overwhelmingly positive. He arrived with a 37-9 record over his previous four seasons, split between Fresno State and Washington, and had just guided the Huskies to a 14-1 season and a College Football Playoff appearance before losing the national championship game to Michigan.
Not everyone in Alabama was sold right away, though. That hesitation made sense.
DeBoer was stepping into a program that had been defined by Saban for nearly two decades, and the first roster turnover only made the transition more dramatic. After Saban left, 40 players entered the transfer portal, but the team still carried plenty of Saban’s players and Saban’s culture into DeBoer’s first season.
That cushion is mostly gone now.
DeBoer is 20-8 through his first two seasons at Alabama. Year 1 brought a 9-4 finish and plenty of criticism because the standard in Tuscaloosa is so much higher than a solid debut. He answered with an 11-4 season in Year 2, getting Alabama back to the SEC Championship Game and into the College Football Playoff.
But the momentum didn’t last. Alabama was beaten 38-3 by Indiana in the quarterfinals, and the conversation around DeBoer quickly turned back to whether he can meet the championship bar that Saban set.
That’s the pressure point now. Alabama has shown it can still operate at an elite level, but in this program, that’s not the finish line. Until DeBoer brings home a national title, every strong season will still be judged against the one standard that matters most in Tuscaloosa.
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