A week after upset victory over Georgia on the road, Alabama football suffered one of the most unexpected losses in recent college football history on Saturday against the Vanderbilt Commodores. After the loss, quarterback Jalen Milroe maintained a level head, but Alabama supporters were not so understanding—this was the team’s first loss to an unranked opponent in almost 20 years.
It was undoubtedly a “back to earth” moment for recently appointed head coach Kalen DeBoer, who instantly lost all of the positive momentum he had built up with his incredible victory over Georgia last week after falling to Vanderbilt, the SEC’s poster child for incompetence.
The Crimson Tide’s defeat was actually so unexpected that Paul Finebaum, an ESPN college football analyst, felt compelled to criticize DeBoer and draw comparisons to former head coach Nick Saban during an interview on The Matt Barrie Show, according to Nick Kosko of On3 Sports.
“So, after all the accolades he received here last week, we saw a new head coach in Alabama named Kalen DeBoer, who showed that the Nick Saban era is over, because Nick Saban would have never lost that game,” Finebaum added.
And when it comes to the Louisiana-Monroe game, folks speak about how Saban inherited a 6-7 club. Finebaum declared, “This is the greatest defeat I have ever witnessed by a top-tier Alabama squad. “I’ve watched poor Alabama teams come up short. However, I’ve never seen a great Alabama team fall like this, and the current loss is rocking the state of Alabama.
In this instance, Finebaum is alluding to a startling defeat at the hands of Louisiana-Monroe that Alabama’s head coach Nick Saban suffered prior to the team’s meteoric rise to prominence.
Because the Alabama football team has never lost games like this under head coach Nick Saban, there isn’t exactly a precedent for what to do in Tuscaloosa following a setback like the one they suffered on Sunday.
Of course, Alabama’s season is far from done with the new 12-team expanded playoff structure, and the team will have plenty of chances to show that the Vanderbilt loss was really an isolated incident.
But it was unsettling to watch Vanderbilt’s motley crew of offensive skill mash up Alabama’s collection of four and five star defensive players, and the Crimson Tide film room is probably not going to be a happy place to be this week.
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