The Ghosts of Alabama Football Are Coming for Kalen DeBoer
The age of Alabama exceptionalism under Nick Saban is over. The age of Crimson Tide fan soul-searching is underway. What does it look like when the reinvention of a storied program clashes with its past?The Ghosts of Alabama Football Are Coming for Kalen DeBoer
The age of Alabama exceptionalism under Nick Saban is over. The age of Crimson Tide fan soul-searching is underway. What does it look like when the reinvention of a storied program clashes with its past?
For a moment, everything is fine. Normal, even. It’s a Saturday afternoon in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, and the September air is hot and thick, oppressive and perfect. The grass smells of sweat and beer. On the south end of Bryant-Denny Stadium, young men in coats and ties stand next to young women in sundresses and, for some, high heels. All together, they belt out the final verse of “Dixieland Delight,” gleefully shouting the lyrics that Bama fans have added for generations.
Spend my dollar (ON BEER!)
Parked in a holler ’neath the mountain moonlight (ROLL TIDE!)
On my way down from the press box to the field, I pass visiting Wisconsin fans, drunk and enthralled. They cheer, mockingly, when their team musters a first down. “I’m proud of you!” one shouts when the Badgers complete a short pass. And they watch, deep into a blowout loss, and dance along with the Bama students in the stands.
A little turtle dovin’ on a Mason-Dixon night (FUCK AUBURN!)
Fits my life (AND LSU!)
Oh, so right (AND TENNESSEE TOO!)
In a moment, the final whistle will blow, and the Crimson Tide players will walk off the field following a 38-14 dismantling of a fading Big Ten power. They will carry an ease with them, having done what was needed, nothing more. Later, in the bars around town, Wisconsin fans will congratulate their Tide counterparts, saying they were just happy to be here, that they knew they would lose but wanted to experience Bama football up close for themselves. The streets will echo with the words “Roll Tide.” The town will settle into a joyful stupor.
It’s three games into an uncertain season that comes on the heels of a disappointing one, all part of a transition from the greatest run in college football history to whatever the hell comes next. A fan base that has grieved, seethed, and attempted to self-soothe now settles into a fleeting sense of relief. It is Saturday afternoon in Tuscaloosa, and Alabama just beat the hell out of a faraway opponent. At least for now, everything feels right with the world.
F-35s fly over Bryant-Denny Stadium before Alabama’s game against the Wisconsin Badgers
“The sky isn’t falling,” says Keith Norton, a 70-year-old Alabama alumnus, former Crimson Tide baseball player, and current business school faculty member. “But it’s a whole lot lower than it used to be.”
Norton is the first person I call on my way down to Tuscaloosa. He’s my wife’s uncle, a man whose memories of living and dying by the Tide stretch back more than six decades. I’m chatting with him in the living room of his condo, footsteps from campus, soon after I’ve arrived in town to explore a simple question: What is it like to be a Bama fan right now? Or more specifically: When you’re accustomed to levels of greatness unlike anything the sport has ever seen, when you’ve spent decades as the force around which all of college football orbits, how much does it suck to be normal? Experiences vary. Wander the town, call around the fan base, and you’ll find tempered optimism around one corner, hysteria around another. But everywhere you’ll find fans grappling with a sense of their own identity, and with what they can expect from the football team whose dominance has changed the shape of their lives. “We lost our golden cow,” says Laura Vale, a 26-year-old alum. “We lost our leader. It hurts.”
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Here are the Tide: 2-1, ranked 17th in the AP poll, with a defense that has given up seven points in the last two games, a quarterback (Ty Simpson) who has outperformed his more highly touted peers in the early going, and one of the nation’s most electrifying playmakers (Ryan Williams) at wide receiver. They have the same mantra as every other team (well, except Clemson) that entered this fall with national title aspirations: All of our goals are in front of us. And it’s true. You don’t have to squint hard to imagine Alabama rolling into Georgia this Saturday and beating the fifth-ranked Bulldogs for the 10th time in their last 11 meetings, then managing to get through the season with one or two more losses, reaching the College Football Playoff, and winning it all.
But here, too, are the Tide: losers of five of their last six games away from home, including the kind of brutal defeats that once seemed incomprehensible when Nick Saban was the head coach—24-3 at Oklahoma, 40-35 at Vanderbilt, 31-17 at Florida State in a 2025 season opener that was even more lopsided than the final score would suggest. The FSU game was damning not just for the loss itself but for how the loss happened. Defenders were out of place and jogging. Both lines got mauled. When Bama lost under Saban, it felt like the opponent had reached the pinnacle of the sport, powered either by a roster that would flood the NFL with stars (2019 LSU, 2021 Georgia) or by an elite quarterback (Cam Newton in 2010, Johnny Manziel in 2012, Deshaun Watson in 2017). Against Florida State, a team that won merely two games all of last year, Alabama’s loss felt like just another Saturday. “This team,” says Roger Myers, a Tuscaloosa native and die-hard fan, “doesn’t strike fear in anybody. That’s the biggest difference.”
Bama is now staring down a schedule that includes six more games against ranked opponents and four more games on the road. Before 2024, the Tide hadn’t lost four games in a season since Saban’s debut at the school in 2007. It stands to reason that two years in a row with that many losses could get his successor, Kalen DeBoer, canned. What comes next will dictate the Tide’s future—and determine the meaning that a community built by Alabama exceptionalism derives from it.
Kalen DeBoer before Alabama’s game against the Louisiana Monroe Warhawks
When I meet Myers, a kind and soft-spoken 65-year-old with short gray hair, he walks me into the basement of his Tuscaloosa home. The house is modest but nice, sitting at the top of a hill in a quiet neighborhood on the eastern edge of town. We turn a corner and arrive at a menagerie of crimson and white. The walls are lined with jerseys and magazine covers, oil paintings of iconic Tide moments and signed photos of Bama legends, from Joe Namath to Bear Bryant to Mark Ingram II to Saban. “When Saban was here, it felt like something miraculous had to happen for us to lose,” he says. “It doesn’t feel that way now.”
Myers tries to keep things in perspective. He takes the long view. He remembers sitting in his bedroom as a child, listening to Bear Bryant’s Tide on the radio. “They painted the picture for you,” he says of the announcers of his youth. He remembers one night in 1971, when he was 11, listening to the Tide play at Southern Cal and hearing the shock in the announcers’ voices when Bryant brought out the wishbone formation for the first time, which Bama had installed in secret during the buildup to that game. “It was so exciting,” he says. “They had to describe the formation for you on the radio, and you could just see it in your mind.”
Myers was a student at Alabama for Bryant’s final two national championship seasons, in 1978 and ’79. He remembers the way the program began to slip in the early 1980s, with Bryant leaving in 1982. Six weeks after his retirement, Bryant died of a heart attack. Myers watched TV coverage of the funeral and processional, and says he’ll never forget the hearse driving all the way from Tuscaloosa to Birmingham with fans lining the highways and standing on overpasses to pay their respects.
In stepped Ray Perkins, who’d previously been head coach of the New York Giants. Immediately, things began to change. Immediately, Tide fans were unhappy. “And not even because of things he was doing on the field,” Myers says. Perkins took down the tower where Bryant used to sit and watch practice, perched high above the field. He changed the program’s sponsors, switching from Coke to Pepsi, sacrilege anywhere in the South, and from Golden Flake potato chips to Frito-Lay.
For Tide fans of a certain generation, Perkins has been on their minds a lot lately. “All these things were iconic among fans of the program,” says Norton. “He just changed them right away.” Says Myers: “It’s like, ‘Wait a minute. What are you doing? This is too many changes.’”
They were pissed about the tower, about the soda, about the chips. Mostly, though, they were pissed because Perkins didn’t win at the level they demanded. They had grown under Bryant to expect a certain standard at Alabama, a belief that nowhere in America would you find a program as consistently dominant as theirs. Under Perkins, the Tide suffered their first losing season in a quarter century when they went 5-6 in 1984. By 1987, he was gone.
It’s been four decades since Perkins took over for Bryant. But now, around the fan base, you hear echoes of 1983. DeBoer allows music in practice. He is stoic on the sideline. He lets freshmen and assistant coaches talk to the media. He modernized the look of the head coach’s office. Message boards have lit up with rumors about the timing of DoorDash orders on the nights before games, as if players needing a late-night snack is a symptom of institutional decline. Quite simply, fans seem to be saying: This ain’t the way we do things around here.
When Saban was here, it felt like something miraculous had to happen for us to lose. It doesn’t feel that way now.Roger Myers
Nothing, though, has frustrated a certain faction of fans more than the hoodie. Yes, a hoodie. For home games, DeBoer tends to wear a thin, black hoodie, emblazoned with “ALABAMA” in block letters and a Nike Swoosh, paired with black pants. “It looks like it came from Walmart,” Myers says. “I mean, you go back to Coach Bryant, and you look at him, and he’s standing on the sideline in a suit. Right? Then you go to Coach Saban, and he’s always in khakis, a collared shirt, looking professional. And now Kalen’s out there, and he looks like he just showed up at your house to do your yard work!”
Myers isn’t alone in his frustration. Criticism of the hoodie became so loud that Chase Goodbread of Tuscaloosa News dedicated a column to the controversy. Lately, fans have noticed that DeBoer has a better record—10-2 vs. 1-3—when wearing the hoodie, but that’s likely because he tends to favor the hoodie when playing at home.
It doesn’t exactly take a psychotherapist to recognize: It’s not about the hoodie. But one item of clothing seems to be connected to one choice to allow music during practice, or one commitment to forego the sideline ass-chewings that Saban became so famous for during his time in Tuscaloosa.
“He’s like the substitute teacher,” says Connie Norton, Keith’s wife. Says Keith: “I don’t think he’s mean enough.”
Paul Bear Bryant on the sideline with QB Terry Davis during the Alabama game against USC on September 10, 1971
During his tenure at Alabama, Saban did not just bring incredible success to the football program: He changed the entire fabric of the university and the town that surrounds it. When Saban was hired in 2007, Alabama had an enrollment of about 25,000 students. Today, that number is greater than 40,000. Much of that increase has been fueled by massive growth in students from out of state. According to The Chronicle of Higher Education, “in 2002, about 77 percent of Alabama’s freshman class was made up of in-state residents; in 2022, that share shrank to 35 percent.”
Go out to dinner at Evangeline’s or River, sit at the bar on the rooftop of the Alamite (the fancy hotel Saban helped bring to town), and you’ll inevitably encounter parents visiting their kids from Oregon or Orange County, Connecticut or Chicago. There are scores of people who never imagined they’d have reason to end up in small-town Alabama, until their kid sat at home on a Saturday afternoon, watched Saban lead a group of destroyers onto a field in front of 100,000 fans, saw the sundresses and the sport coats and the life leaving the opponents’ eyes, and thought to themselves, I would like to go wherever that is.
One of those students is Michel Bedard. A senior sport management major, he remembers watching the Tide from his home in Frederick, Maryland. “I got used to seeing the winning ways,” he says. “I wanted a piece of it.”
Now here he is. Once he arrived, he realized he was far from the only Northerner who decided he wanted to go to college down south. “Most of my closest friends here—two of them are from Jersey, three of them are from New York. Others are from Pittsburgh, Michigan, places like that,” Bedard says. “But there is this common thread. We all came here to witness the greatness of Alabama football.”
I don’t think he’s mean enough.Keith Norton, on Kalen DeBoer
The school has welcomed them. Recruiters fan out from Tuscaloosa to all corners of the country, particularly in wealthy neighborhoods, where they find kids with parents happy to pay out-of-state tuition. During my time in town, I meet students from Kansas, New York, and Napa, California. The image of the rural Alabamian who lives and dies by the Tide has persisted for a reason, but today, a significant chunk of the student section is made up of kids who just thought Bryant-Denny looked cool on TV. “Game days are just so different here than they are up north,” says Jake Clark, Bedard’s roommate from Bedminster, New Jersey. “The stadium is crazy, but it’s not just that. It’s getting dressed up, the fancy outfits, going out on the quad, the whole thing. I wanted that.”
They also want to win. “When I decided to come here,” Clark says, “I thought we had at least four more years of Saban.” Saban had just signed an eight-year extension with the school. He showed no real signs of slowing down. But then, a few days after Alabama lost a heartbreaker to Michigan in the 2023 College Football Playoff semifinals, Clark checked his phone and saw a flurry of texts. “I was like, ‘Oh, my God. No.’ The whole campus was in shock.”
For students like Clark and Bedard, Saban’s retirement meant the loss of the man who had built Alabama into the university they wanted to attend. They were shocked, but not quite devastated. Not like the in-state students I talked to, who couldn’t remember a time when Saban wasn’t a central part of their lives. When the university hired DeBoer, they were eager to see what a different version of the program might look like. And while some older fans are already wondering who might coach Bama next, Clark preaches patience. “Everyone needs to relax a little bit,” he says. “I know that’s not how Alabama fans work. I’ve watched The Finebaum Show. I see it. But let’s just relax.”
Even without the team having an aura of invincibility, the school has plenty of appeal. “I still have my fun,” says Bedard. “I still drink on the quad. I still go to the bars for a game and stuff. It’s still a massive thing down here, but you can definitely feel a little bit that the vibe is off.” He thinks back to the day of the Florida State game. “Everyone on campus looked dead. Campus was just absolutely dead. It didn’t feel normal at all.”
Florida State defensive back Ja’Bril Rawls and Alabama running back Kevin Riley collide during the game on August 30
Hunter Johnson is trying to relax. He’s standing on the balcony of an apartment building just across the street from Bryant-Denny Stadium, mimosa in hand at 9 a.m. on the day of the Wisconsin game, smiling. “Welcome,” he says, before offering me breakfast, booze, or both. We get to talking, and soon I’m telling him about my conversations with students, about the phenomenon of out-of-staters enrolling at Bama with the expectation of national titles.
“Fuck those Yankees,” Johnson says. He laughs. “My culture is not your costume.”
Johnson is 40 years old and very obviously joking. (He makes it clear that he thinks the recruitment of out-of-state students has been good for the university.) He grew up in Tuscaloosa; his mother worked in the athletics department for 37 years. He’s now a radio announcer for Alabama basketball games. “It wasn’t a choice for me to become an Alabama fan,” he says. “It just kind of got put in me from the very beginning.”
For fans of Johnson’s age, that meant a childhood spent learning to experience and endure pain. This is one of the most striking things about talking with Bama fans—how widely experiences vary across generations. Older fans like Myers think back to the Bryant years, drawing parallels between the man who banished Golden Flake potato chips and the man who roams the sideline in black hoodies. The current students grew up in a world where college football was defined and dominated by Saban. But those in between—mostly millennial and Gen X fans—were raised with a different relationship to Bama football.
“It was kind of an abyss,” says Johnson, referring to the teams of his youth. He grew up with the expectation of greatness in Tuscaloosa, the notion that this place had produced some of the best teams in the sport’s history and one day would again. But he saw no evidence to back that up. Instead, he watched one mediocre coach after another, saw the rising enthusiasm after the initial press conferences give way to the slow deflation of the fan base as it realized that the Tide had hired another dud, and felt the descent into collective misery as everyone recognized just how many years had passed since Bama’s heyday. “You go from coach to coach, you have random peaks, these great seasons,” Johnson says, “then the next year you go 3-8 and the coach gets fired, and you’re starting all over again.”
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Worst of all: Auburn was good. For millennial Bama fans, formative years were spent watching Cadillac Williams and Ronnie Brown run wild down on the Plains, as Tommy Tuberville lifted the Tigers to near the top of the SEC’s pecking order. Auburn won seven of eight Iron Bowls from 2000 to 2007. Those memories are burned into the minds of fans now in their late 30s and early 40s. “I joke with my buddies, these out-of-state kids don’t know what we went through,” says Conner Norton, Keith’s son and my cousin-in-law, a Bama grad who has traveled to watch the Tide play in seven national championship games. “They didn’t wake up to see that their house was rolled with toilet paper after Auburn won. They didn’t have to go to school every year getting laughed at by the Auburn kids because Tommy Tuberville just beat us again.”
Johnson remembers hearing fans of his parents’ generation wax on about the old days, hearing the way they thundered with anger because Bama had fallen so far below the standard set by the Bear. “I would think, These old farts don’t get it,” he says. “They’re delusional. It’s never going to be like that again.”
But then, all of a sudden, it was. Better, in fact. When Saban was hired, Johnson and some friends bought beer, ordered pizza, and went to the airport to lay eyes on the man who would save them. A couple of months later, 90,000 fans showed up to Bryant-Denny for the team’s spring game. Saban famously went 7-6 in his first season, but in his first full recruiting cycle, he secured one of the greatest classes in college football history, which featured Julio Jones, Mark Ingram II, Marcell Dareus, and Mark Barron. “Here it is,” Conner says. “It’s happening. This is what my parents always told me about.”
They got used to it quickly. Winning was exhilarating, then expected, then mundane. At the tailgate with Johnson, I meet Cruz Oxenreider, an alum who saw Bama win three national championships in his four years on campus. “I got so unbelievably spoiled,” he says. “We all did.”
Saban watches from the sideline during the 2012 national championship game against LSU
So where does this leave the Bama fan base? Still in a state of flux. At least half the fans I talked to advocated for some level of patience.
“I still believe in the guy,” Clark says of DeBoer.
“He was the right hire,” says Johnson.
Oxenreider thinks the fan base has to face reality. “The days of dominating like we used to are done,” he says. “Not just for us, but for anybody.” He points to the changes in the sport. The transfer portal and NIL have hollowed out roster depth in the sport’s elite programs, making it nearly impossible to stack up the absurd levels of talent that defined Saban’s greatest teams. He said this brings him some measure of comfort; if Bama can’t have a run like the one it did under Saban, at least, he believes, no one else can either. And as for the current team? “We’re fine,” he says. “We’re not going anywhere.”
Others aren’t so sure. “He said it was his dream to coach at Alabama,” Vale says of DeBoer. “I’m not sure he’s performing like it was his dream to coach at Alabama.” Soon after the Florida State loss, Vale, a TV newscaster in Georgia, says she was asked on air what she’d do if she won the $1.8 billion Powerball lottery. “I’d take $70 million of it,” she remembers saying, “and pay Kalen DeBoer to get out of Tuscaloosa.”
Conner said one of his group chats has already started debating potential replacements. Bedard, the student from Maryland who was drawn to Alabama due in large part to Saban’s greatness, also seemed unconvinced. “We ask for a lot here,” he says. “Probably too much. Way too much. But as for what we expected from Alabama football, I don’t think we’re getting what I expected when I came in my freshman year.”
I got so unbelievably spoiled. We all did.Cruz Oxenreider
The older fans, though—the ones who saw greatness under Bryant and questioned whether they’d ever see it again, the ones who told their kids fantastical tales about the days when Bama would beat anyone and then watched in disbelief as their school hired the one coach capable of surpassing the standard that Bryant had set, the ones who welcomed grandchildren into a world where Bama still dominated college football—those fans sounded even more skeptical. “If we go get destroyed by Georgia,” Keith Norton says, “not just beat, but destroyed, I’m not sure there’s any coming back from that.”
My sense, when talking to the older fans, is that their years of devotion to the Tide have given them an idea of all that’s possible. They learned as children how great their beloved team could be. They relearned it in middle age. In between, they saw how the premier program in the history of the sport could devolve into just another football team, with talented but underperforming rosters and one coach after another trying and failing to recapture all that’s been lost.
I think about this most when talking to Myers. As we talk, he takes me to the side door of his home, leading to the carport, and he smiles as he points at a sign that hangs on the wall.
HOME OF COACH PAUL “BEAR” BRYANT
1958-1970
A few years ago, when Myers was looking for a house, his realtor tipped him off to this before it went on the market. Myers bought it and moved in. Now he plays pool on the same table where Bryant once played, watches road games in the basement theater that’s been made into a shrine for the man who once lived here. Myers roots for the team he loves in the present. He still clings to belief in the Tide’s future. And he does it all here, in this home, a shrine to the past.
Back when Bryant was hired, the University of Alabama bought this house for him for $57,000, the equivalent of about $645,000 today. Myers grew up a few houses down and remembers seeing Bryant around the neighborhood. His wife, Mary, lavished the neighborhood kids with candy every Halloween.
“Things,” he says, his voice soft and warm, “were so different then.”
