On Mondays, the Alabama coaching staff all hold press conferences with the media while the players have the day off. After a very dark opening to the season, the local reporters were asking the coaches the hard questions- often talking about team effort and questioning the coaching choices to rotate so many players.
This AL.com article hits most of the high points from all three pressers if you want it. Otherwise, the full videos are below.
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Kane Wommack
Wommack’s main focus was on how timid the defense played and acknowledging that his defense has been having problems with mobile QBs for two years now.
Ryan Grubb
This press conference annoyed me more than the other two. Part of that is that it feels like an extension of every single Ryan Grubb presser with Seattle last year: “we wanted to run the ball more, but the game just got away from us.” Wash, rinse, repeat. Get used to it, guys.
Kalen DeBoer
— DeBoer on penalties: “There are a lot of consequences that go along. Especially the foolish penalties.” … “You know the quarterback is going to be protected, and you can’t live in the gray area.” … “It’s certainly addressed, now the guys just have to do it.”
— “What they guys need to do is cut it loose. They just need to go play.” DeBoer was emphatic about this. “That was my message yesterday. Don’t overthink this.” … “Go have fun doing it. Don’t overthink this.” … Don’t listen to outside noise, he said. “Play with an edge, too. We’ve got something to prove.”
DeBoer made an interesting point when he was asked about penalties. Essentially, yes, players are getting punished for dumb personal foul penalties. However, if each player learns their lesson the first time after getting punished, then that’s still going to be a whole lot of penalties over the course of a season – so how do we get the team to take accountability to never have to be punished in the first place?
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Now, for what it’s worth, I have no idea what the answer is there. Or how to even really approach that. But, that’s why he’s paid the big $$$ – to figure that out.
In any case, we also got a quick injury update.
Jaeden Roberts should be good to go next week. Jah-Marien Latham is still day-to-day with a “lower body” injury. Isaiah Horton should be good to go by the end of the week. Tim Keenan and Jam Miller are still out. And Ryan Williams has a concussion and is “Day-to-day.”
Anyway, Alabama’s been all the talk in college football the last few days, and Nick Saban as asked about it during his pre-game gig last night.
“For me and a lot of the Bama fans, the disappointment [is] that Florida State dominated the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball,” Saban said on ESPN prior to the game between North Carolina and TCU.
“The good news is, every team has the best opportunity to improve from week one to week two,” added Saban. “Going into the season, you don’t really know what you have for sure as a coach, and you’re always very anxious about what might happen in the first game.”
An interesting thought, to me, is how college football seems to keep moving closer to an NFL structure. And in the NFL, week 1 is always some wild collection of results with things that wind up not being very indicative of how the rest of the season goes for most teams. Of course, maybe that’s just me taking the copium. Still, this game felt a lot like that, as the team was still rotating players around to figure out who can do what.
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Ultimately, it is a long season and this is a very easy loss to recover from. In a vacuum. The problem is that it’s coupled with the losses to Michigan and Oklahoma to end the season last year, and when viewed in the lens of being a trend, it’s a very, very bad trend for Alabama.
NFL head coaches and general managers are often the subject of external debates about blame — and sometimes internal power struggles, too. As the pay and influence of college football general managers grow, so should those GMs’ place in public discourse when their teams win and lose.
Morgan landed on the plane with Kalen DeBoer in January 2024 and plays a key role in Alabama’s recruiting both of high school players and those from the transfer portal. He deserves credit for helping assemble a 2026 high school class that currently ranks No. 5 nationally in 247 Sports’ rankings.
It’s also fair to question Morgan and his staff for a 2025 transfer portal class that underwhelmed in its debut Saturday.
Alabama added 12 transfer portal players this past offseason, a class that ranked No. 21 by 247 Sports’ grading system. Two of those additions were walk-on tight ends in Peter Knudson (Weber State) and Jayden Hobson (South Alabama), and Hobson left the team during fall camp.
Of the remaining 10 players, arguably only three played significant roles in the season opener: left guard Kam Dewberry (Texas A&M), wide receiver Isaiah Horton (Miami) and punter Blake Doud (Colorado School of Mines).
This article from Mike Rodak is an interesting angle that I haven’t really seen anyone else talk about. Despite the Tide pulling in a big recruiting class, their transfer portal group wasn’t a heralded one. The biggest disappointment was the lack of reinforcements on the defensive line, and the lone addition, Kelby Collins, saw all of 3 snaps as Alabama turned to freshmen instead.
I’ve long been a proponent of building through the draft and not free agency in the NFL, but you have to wonder if relying on recruiting to stay at the top is becoming less viable in college.
