Alabama has its pick for a new head football coach in Kalen DeBoer – in what is a stunning rise through the bowels of college football to the most elite program in the sport.
DeBoer recently led the University of Washington Huskies to a national championship berth, an undefeated regular season, and the last Pac-12 title in history.
But according to ESPN’s Mark Schlabach and Chris Low, DeBoer is Alabama’s pick to replace the retiring Nick Saban – with the Huskies coach in contract negotiations for the job.
The 49-year-old DeBoer had been in charge in Seattle for just two seasons – going 25-3 with the Huskies and winning both the Alamo Bowl and the Sugar Bowl.
Washington finished the season ranked second in the country with a 14-1 record – the one loss coming to Michigan in the CFP National Championship Game.
Kalen DeBoer is now in discussions to take over the Alabama Crimson Tide football program
It’s a job that comes with the most pressure and expectations of any other in college football – with the atmosphere in Tuscaloosa demanding championships each season.
It didn’t use to be like that. At the time Saban took over, Alabama was arguably at an all-time low-point.
Since then, Saban won six national titles and brought the program back to national relevance – all while cementing himself as arguably college football’s greatest ever leader.
Now, that job falls to a 49-year-old whose first head coaching job was at the University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota – a school that doesn’t even compete in the NCAA, but rather the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics or NAIA.
Sioux Falls is where DeBoer played his college football before immediately becoming a wide receiver coach upon graduating.
After two seasons of high school coaching after that, he returned to Sioux Falls as their offensive coordinator before taking over as head coach from 2005-2009.
There, he reached five straight NAIA national championship games, winning three of them.
Between 2010 and 2019, DeBoer was the offensive coordinator at four different programs: Southern Illinois (2010-2013), Eastern Michigan (2014-2016), Fresno State (2017-2018), and Indiana (2019).
DeBoer was hired by Washington in 2021 after going 9-3 with Fresno State the season prior
After that single year with Indiana, DeBoer took his first head coaching job at the NCAA level – making a return to Fresno State.
DeBoer went 3-3 with the Bulldogs in the Covid year of 2020, but then promptly rebounded in 2021 – going 9-3 and winning the New Mexico Bowl over UTEP.
In 2021, the University of Washington fired their head coach – current Los Angeles Rams assistant head coach Jimmy Lake – and replaced him with DeBoer.
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