In the long offseason when time seems to stand still it can be easy to forget that Alabama still hasn’t played a game without coach Nick Saban. The debut for new coach Kalen DeBoer remains several weeks away.
But the new Crimson Tide head coach has already had his fair share of ‘Welcome to Alabama’ moments.
“I think the two that are the most obvious are when I first got here with my family and we first landed at the airport and it felt like thousands of people there, the whole town was there it seemed like,” Kalen DeBoer said on The Jim Rome Show. “That was just a great indication there of the passion the fanbase has.”
It was only the first indicator of the magnitude of Alabama football, though, and it certainly won’t be the last for the new head coach.
In fact, he’s probably got several more of those moments along the way over the course of the next seven months. But he just keeps checking them off one at a time, like he has done thus far.
“Then the A-Day Game, spring game here at the stadium, just 70-plus thousand, 72,000 people there excited about watching these guys play their spring game,” Kalen DeBoer said. “Practice 15 in our case, but that continues to be the case wherever you go around town, that excitement and the season’s coming quickly and they can feel it and it’s continuing to grow.”
DeBoer will have a monumental task taking over for Saban. Few will quite expect him to reach that level of dominance, but there will be plenty of Alabama fans who expect close to it.
Simply put, winning isn’t really an option at Alabama. Don’t do it at a high enough level and you’ll be out.
That passion can turn into a bad time for a coach in a hurry.
But Kalen DeBoer remains very confident in his approach and the steps he and his staff have taken to keep things flying right on down the tracks. Enjoying the enormity of the moment isn’t really a luxury DeBoer plans to indulge in.
“It’s going to be a fun time. I am a person that you can’t be in that moment and have those emotions, but I certainly have a perspective,” he said. “And I had that in the spring game for maybe three seconds, just the perspective of enjoying where you’re at. In the end it’s still, again, is a time I just want these guys as a team to experience the emotions you’re referring to, and then my job is to keep them in the right spot and go do what we do.”
But make no mistake about it. Kalen DeBoer is ready for that season opener.
“That’s going to be a great day at the end of August,” he said.
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