'One of the great recruiting runs we've seen': Paul Finebaum likens Kalen DeBoer's success to Alabama legend Nick Saban
The Alabama Crimson Tide are coming off a rough end to Kalen DeBoer's debut season with the program after replacing legendary head coach Nick Saban. But while his 9-4 on-field record wasn't impressive, recruits don't seem to care. While Alabama hasn't been landing every five-star talent they chase, they're building one of the best classes […]
The Alabama Crimson Tide are coming off a rough end to Kalen DeBoer's debut season with the program after replacing legendary head coach Nick Saban. But while his 9-4 on-field record wasn't impressive, recruits don't seem to care.
While Alabama hasn't been landing every five-star talent they chase, they're building one of the best classes in the nation. It's possible they'll finish first ahead of all peers, including Ohio State and Texas. And that success has pundits like Paul Finebaum noticing where Alabama could be headed.
Finebaum appears bought into DeBoer's program now as much as he ever has been, telling Greg McElroy this is an impressive operation. He even went so far as to compare his off-field pitch to Saban's fastball.
“I think, overall, Kalen DeBoer, with the addition of Ryan Grubb and finally the staff a little bit more to his liking, has brought continuity and that’s evidenced by him retaining his players in the spring, which I think is a very big deal for that purpose, and I think it’s oozing over to recruiting,” Finebaum started.
“Quite frankly, this is one of the great recruiting runs we’ve seen in some years. It almost feels like Nick Saban is running the ship again when it comes to recruiting because this is vintage Alabama recruiting," Finebaum said.
Alabama has landed nine commitments this month as the dead period has set in before July hits. DeBoer has built the seventh-ranked class thus far, but getting five-stars like Ezavier Crowell, Xavier Griffin, and four-stars Jett Thomalla, Mack Sutter, and a bunch of others has the momentum swinging in their favor.
Finebaum topped off his comments with the following.
"Nick Saban may be gone but Alabama is still one of the great standards of all time in college football and I think a lot of people forgot that, especially younger people who only knew the Nick Saban era,” said Finebaum. “Even during other coaching terms, and I’m preaching to the choir here, Alabama never got hung up on the record. They knew they were Alabama and it upset a lot of people, it came off as arrogant and cocky but it has always been able to be backed up over the course of history. There’s a reason why there’s so many statues outside Bryant-Denny Stadium for coaches who have won national championships.”
“While recruiting is not the final arbiter in college football anymore, and we all know that and we all talk about that every day, it is still an incredibly important sign,” Finebaum said. “What I’m interested in, and I will leave it to the recruiting experts because I’m not one either, is, if Alabama is doing this well, it’s at the expense of who? Because Alabama has been losing these battles over the last year or two. Not all of them but they were losing some of them. Right now, it looks like they’re winning almost all of them.”
