New Alabama football coach Kalen DeBoer is incredibly accomplished, with a 104–12 as head coach across all divisions, a slew of Coach of the Year awards and a trip to the national championship game.
For all of that success, there is one thing he doesn’t bring to the job vacated by Nick Saban: SEC experience.
In four seasons as an FBS-level head coach, DeBoer has not faced one SEC program, and his experience against SEC teams as a whole is extremely limited.
Gary Cosby Jr./Tuscaloosa News/USA TODAY Network
Coincidentally, his last game against an SEC program came against Alabama in 2017, his first season as offensive coordinator at Fresno State. His Bulldogs traveled to Tuscaloosa, falling to the eventual-national-champion Crimson Tide, 41–10. A week later, the Bulldogs would take on the other Power 5 program he’d go on to lead, Washington, losing 48–16 on the road.
As offensive coordinator at Eastern Michigan, DeBoer coached at LSU in ’15 and Missouri in ’16. In 2011, as coordinator at FCS program Southern Illinois, he coached at Ole Miss.
However, he’s never faced any of the teams on Alabama’s 2024 schedule as a head coach. Here is what DeBoer will be up against this fall.
2024 Alabama football schedule:
- Aug. 31 - vs. Western Kentucky
- Sept. 7 - vs. South Florida
- Sept. 14 - at Wisconsin
- Sept. 28 - vs. Georgia
- Oct. 5 - at Vanderbilt
- Oct. 12 - vs. South Carolina
- oct. 19 - at Tennessee
- Oct. 26 - vs. Missouri
- Nov. 9 - at LSU
- Nov. 16 - vs. Mercer
- Nov. 23 - at Oklahoma
- Nov. 30 - vs. Auburn
Recent history has proven that a coach doesn’t necessarily need Southern roots or SEC experience to thrive in the league. Saban is, of course, from West Virginia, and before heading to LSU, he rose through the coaching ranks primarily in the Midwest and Northeast, notably as head coach at Toledo and Michigan State. At the same time, he was a proven commodity in the South by the time Alabama hired him away from the Miami Dolphins, having won a national title with the Tigers in the 2003 season.
DeBoer might not have experience against the SEC as we know it, but as a result of conference realignment, there is one future conference foe he is quite familiar with. In 2022, Washington beat Steve Sarkisian and Texas, 27–20, in the Alamo Bowl. This year, the Huskies won a rematch in the College Football Playoff semifinal at the Sugar Bowl, 37–31.
