Alabama’s recruiting numbers may not be lighting up the old-school scoreboard right now, but there’s no need to hit the panic button in Tuscaloosa.
That’s the reality of roster building in this era. The Crimson Tide are operating in a different game than the one Nick Saban mastered for nearly two decades, when Alabama finished with a No. 1 recruiting ranking by one service or another in 13 of 17 classes. Only two of those classes failed to land at least No. 2, and the lone class outside the Top 5 was Saban’s first in 2007.
The bigger point is that college football has changed, and the money now matters just as much as the recruiting rankings. College Front Office recently estimated the roster value of the top 15 spenders in the sport, with teams ranging from $30 million to $48 million.
Alabama came in at an estimated $37.2 million, which placed the Tide at No. 8, just behind Texas A&M and four spots ahead of No. 12 Georgia.
In that range, the expectation is simple: if the evaluations are right, the roster should be good enough to win at a high level.
And Alabama’s roster is in much better shape than the current recruiting chatter might suggest. The Tide’s last two high school signing classes ranked No. 2 and No. 3 nationally by On3, and 46 of those 47 players are still on the team.
On top of that, 37 of the 44 players projected on Alabama’s two-deep roster at Ourlads.com have eligibility beyond this season. That means Alabama is only set to lose seven players because of expired eligibility.
Kalen Deboer has said more than once that this will be a smaller class, and the reasoning is straightforward: retention is the priority. This doesn’t look like a last-minute scramble. Deboer and GM Courtney Morgan didn’t suddenly discover the resources had run dry in February.
That’s because roster management now has three moving parts: high school recruiting, transfer portal additions and keeping your own players from leaving. For Alabama, with an estimated $37.2 million roster value, a big chunk of that budget has to go toward holding together the 84% of the depth chart that can return.
Even if you factor in some attrition - say three early NFL Draft entries and five players from the two-deep entering the portal - Alabama would still be looking at only 15 departures. That still leaves enough flexibility to add portal help where needed next year.
The contrast with Deboer’s first two years is stark. When Nick Saban retired in January of 2024, Alabama took a major hit to its roster.
The Tide lost a large class to exhausted eligibility, including 10 players selected in the 2024 NFL Draft, and then watched 26 transfers leave after Saban stepped away. In practical terms, that was like losing two full recruiting classes in one offseason.
That kind of turnover explains why Alabama pushed so hard in high school recruiting during those first two offseasons, and why depth was such a problem over the last two years. Now the roster is full, young and packed with players who should become major pieces as second- and third-year players in 2026.
That youth comes with another financial reality. As those players take on bigger roles, they’ll naturally expect bigger paydays in the following year.
So Alabama has to be selective now, identifying which players matter most and preserving enough money to keep what could be a top-5 to top-8 roster in pure talent. There’s also the possibility of a returning starting quarterback, and those don’t come cheap.
So no, Alabama is not broke. The Tide are making a calculated choice to keep a talented young roster together as it develops over the next two years. If 2026 goes well and Alabama keeps most of its top players, then 2027 could be the season when the Crimson Tide are back among the sport’s true title favorites.
That’s the gamble Courtney Morgan and Kalen Deboer are making. In today’s college football, it’s a smart one.
In Other News...
Two Alabama Legends Just Weighed In On Kalen DeBoers Plan
On a podcast, two familiar Alabama voices came to the defense of Kalen DeBoer and Courtney Morgans approach to building the roster, backing a strategy that leans as much on keeping people in place as it does on adding new talent. Former Tide standouts AJ McCarron and Trent Richardson framed the conversation around the realities of the modern sport, where NIL and the Transfer Portal can turn roster management into a year-round test of patience and priority.
For Alabama, the larger question is not whether it can still attract elite recruits, because it already has landed some highly regarded names. It is whether the Tide can pair those additions with a locker room that develops together and stays intact long enough for DeBoers plan to take hold, which is exactly the balance McCarron and Richardson were pointing toward as they talked through the coachs vision. [Read more 🡒]
Nick Saban Just Took An Unusual Step For Terrion Arnold
Nick Saban took a rare and notable step this week by sending a character reference letter on Terrion Arnolds behalf during the former Alabama standouts bond hearing in Florida. The letter came as Arnold worked through a legal process tied to an incident earlier this year in Tampa, a development that immediately put his situation in a different light than the football questions that usually follow a player of his profile.
Arnold was granted $1 million bail after the hearing, but his legal situation is still far from settled. What happens next will matter well beyond one courtroom, especially for an Alabama program that watched Arnold rise under Saban and now sees one of its former players facing a deeply uncertain road. [Read more 🡒]
Another Kalen DeBoer Ranking Just Gave Alabama Fans A Reason To Stew
A fresh round of college football debate has Alabama fans looking at Kalen DeBoer through the lens of yet another ranking exercise, this time from On3 analysts Andy Staples and Ari Wasserman. Their speculative draft of the top 20 head coaches was built as opinion and analysis, but it still put DeBoer in a spot that will catch the eye in Tuscaloosa, especially given how quickly he has become part of the conversation around the sports elite sideline minds.
DeBoer came off the board at No. 11, behind Mike Elko, Kyle Whittingham and Lane Kiffin, which is exactly the kind of order that can stir up a fan base already inclined to defend its coach. The argument attached to the placement is pretty simple: Alabama supporters have a case to be irritated, because the ranking suggests DeBoer has already done more than some of the names selected ahead of him. [Read more 🡒]