Bray Hubbard already had plenty on his plate this week, but the Alabama safety still found time to handle birthday duties for Kalen DeBoer.
After Alabama’s 31-20 win over Texas A&M, Hubbard helped lead the postgame celebration for the Crimson Tide’s head coach, who turned 52 and had given the team permission to do "whatever" it wanted to if it came away with a victory.
Hubbard said the setup started in the locker room, where he asked athletic trainer Jeff Allen for a bucket of ice water. What arrived first had towels in it, which Hubbard made sure to remove before the prank got underway.
"As soon as I got in the locker room, I was like, I was telling Jeff Allen (athletic trainer), I said, Jeff, I need a, I need a ice bucket full of water, full of ice," Hubbard said. "He was like, 'Alright.'
So he gets on his radio, whatever, and he brought me one, and there were there were towels in it to start, and I was like, 'No, y'all got to take the towels out. We can't have towels flying around.'"
From there, the mission turned into a stealth operation in a cramped space, with Hubbard trying to avoid tipping off DeBoer while lining up the soak. He said he enlisted Jackson Lloyd and tried to get Keelon to pull DeBoer’s attention away before the bucket came flying in.
"I'm surprised he didn't see it," Hubbard said. "I called Jackson Lloyd over.
I was like, 'Jackson, we've got to we got to do this,' and so we grabbed the bucket, and we started walking. And when guys started moving, I was like, 'No, no, no, y'all got to stay.'
Like, he can't see this because he's staring dead at us. I was like, 'Can't see us.'
And I thought he saw the bucket a couple times. And I was like, 'Keelon, you've got to go around and you've got to try to get his attention on the other side, where he looks away from us, so we can come in.'
When Hubbard and Lloyd finally got close enough, the bucket got delivered and DeBoer got drenched.
"I don't even know what happened," Hubbard said. "We just all of a sudden grabbed it and just went, and he turned right into it.
And he was completely shocked. He didn't know.
I thought he saw the bucket, but he didn't."
DeBoer’s reaction matched the mood. He laughed afterward and called it "a cold one." The win made the whole thing even sweeter, and he said that the victory was the only birthday gift he really wanted.
"If you get a win, you can do whatever you want. That's what I said earlier in the week" DeBoer said.
"This is really the only birthday gift I was I was wanting, you know, finding a way to get a win tonight. So super proud of these guys."
Hubbard’s bigger night, of course, came on the field first. As Alabama’s only healthy captain, he carried extra weight in the buildup to the Texas A&M game, and he answered with five tackles in a defensive performance that felt like a step back toward form. The Crimson Tide held the Aggies to 4-for-12 on third and fourth downs and later shut down quarterback Marcel Reed.
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