Alabama's better off now with Kalen DeBoer rather than Nick Saban

Let's not overthink it. Let's come right out and say it. The Alabama football program is better off right now without Nick Saban as head coach.

Blasphemy, you say, like the unfiltered alternative lyrics to Dixieland Delight? Temporary insanity brought on by Miss Terry outpicking her alleged football genius of a husband on GameDay? Recency bias tossing my equilibrium, my perspective and my grip on time and space into a blender like the Keystone Kops in the Georgia secondary lost in Ryan Williams' jet wash?

Wait. I'm gonna hit the brakes. Everything you thought you knew about life after Saban will fly right by. Forget DaGOAT and DaBear. There's a new Top Gun Maverick in town, and his name is DeBoer. Kalen DeBoer.

Sure, sure, we've seen the absolute cinema that was Alabama 41, Georgia 34 before. In a way, even if this sequel was more pulse-pounding than anything these characters have produced since the original Second and 26, DeBoer's first Alabama team simply followed the lead set by Saban's teams from 2017 through 2023. Those teams taught the Bulldogs to behave five times in six tries while Smart and company were dominating the rest of the SEC with 55 victories and only six defeats.

Adding to Smart's sad song in the making - "The Crimson Tide is My White Whale Blues" - while barely avoiding another Camback doesn't equal that lengthy stretch of mentor-protege domination, let alone erase it.

But the been-here, done-this nature of the result, coupled with the sensory overload of the 60-minute thrill ride that led to it, made it easy to miss a larger point. The man Greg Byrne selected to take on this challenge passed his first real test in two wildly disparate ways. ...

Read Kevin's entire column in the Lede.