TUSCALOOSA, Ala. -- The pun, purposeful or not, is not lost on a grinning Ryan Williams.
"It was basically the elephant in the room," Williams said.
He wasn't referring to Big Al, the Crimson Tide's costumed elephant mascot, but to a team meeting that left an indelible mark on the Alabama players as they returned to campus Jan. 13. A meeting in which head strength coach David Ballou spared absolutely nobody in an earsplitting tirade meant to set the tone for Year 2 under head coach Kalen DeBoer. After DeBoer spoke to the team first, Ballou took center stage. He called out players for their lack of urgency, and his message was crystal clear: "If you don't want to be here, leave."
That directive was essentially the final remnant of a 2024 season that saw Alabama lose four games and finish outside the final AP top 10 for the first time since 2007, which was Nick Saban's first season in Tuscaloosa. It was only the third time in 11 seasons that the Crimson Tide missed the College Football Playoff.
"It just wasn't good enough," Williams said. "We didn't live up to the Alabama standard this past season, and it needed to be addressed. We all knew it, but it's never a bad thing to be reminded. Literally, my whole life, the only thing I remember is Alabama winning championships and winning at least 10 games every year.
"I was a part of the team that didn't. So, what are you going to do about it?"
The early returns will start to roll in Saturday when No. 8 Alabama travels to Florida State for the 2025 season opener (3:30 p.m. ET, ABC).
For the first time since Saban's tenure began, an air of vulnerability surrounding Alabama's program began to seep in as last season's herky-jerky ride came to a close. That's what happens when you lose by three touchdowns to a struggling Oklahoma team in the next-to-last game of the regular season, then fall to a substandard Michigan squad in the ReliaQuest Bowl, scoring a total of 16 points in those two contests. And that was after the Tide already had dropped games to rival Tennessee and Vanderbilt, which beat Alabama for the first time in 40 years, sending fans parading the goalposts through downtown Nashville.
This offseason, opposing players weren't shy about popping off when the subject turned to Alabama, including Florida State quarterback Tommy Castellanos. In a June interview, he said the Crimson Tide "don't have Nick Saban to save them" and didn't back down from those comments a month later at ACC media days.
"None of that stuff matters," Alabama defensive end LT Overton said. "We'll do our talking on the field, and that's by the way we play. And this year, it's not going to matter who we play."
Under Saban, facing Alabama was the proverbial Super Bowl for just about every team it faced, and one of the more remarkable statistics from the legendary coach's 17 seasons is that the Crimson Tide won 100 straight games against unranked opponents. A year ago, three of Alabama's four losses were to unranked teams.
"When you're going through a transition, performance and consistency tend to suffer," said head athletic trainer Jeff Allen, who came to Alabama with Saban in 2007 and was a part of that first team, which was wildly inconsistent and finished 7-6.
"A lot of people forget how hard that transition was under Coach Saban. We beat Tennessee and almost beat [eventual national champion] LSU and then lost two weeks later to Louisiana-Monroe."
Similarly, last season the Tide beat then-No. 2 Georgia in Week 4 to vault to No. 1 in the AP poll the game before they lost to Vanderbilt.
Last Thursday, before Alabama left the practice field on a sweltering hot morning in Tuscaloosa, DeBoer and Ballou both stressed the importance of urgency, a regular Thursday theme for the Crimson Tide.
But senior defensive tackle Tim Keenan III, one of Alabama's four captains, had the most poignant message upon breaking the team down at the end of practice.
"We got to remember that we're Alabama," Keenan shouted. "People want our heads on a platter. They're not going to get it."
ONE OF DeBOER'S "superpowers," according to defensive coordinator Kane Wommack, is his steadiness and ability to see the bigger picture no matter how good or bad things are going around him.
"You're going to get the same version of him every day, and that's why people love working and playing for him," said Wommack, who worked with DeBoer at Indiana in 2019.
Ballou was also on that staff at Indiana, along with current Alabama quarterbacks coach Nick Sheridan.
Perhaps the biggest coup for DeBoer this season is getting Ryan Grubb back as offensive coordinator. Grubb spent last season with the Seattle Seahawks.
"I think that's probably helped me push the envelope even more," DeBoer said.
The two go back to their days at Sioux Falls beginning in 2007 and spent three other coaching stops together at Eastern Michigan, Fresno State and Washington.
"The more time you're together, the more aligned you are," DeBoer said. "Everything you message internally and externally is going to be consistent, and the key, I think, to great coaching staffs and great teams is to tap into the strengths of everyone that you have in your program. We have different personalities, different strengths and different perspectives, and that's what makes it awesome."
Offensive tackle Kadyn Proctor joked that Grubb "brings the muscle," but said it's wrong to think that DeBoer's "fatherly side" should be mistaken for being easy or soft on the players. Senior linebacker Deontae Lawson has grown leery of hearing that narrative.
"Look, last year when Coach DeBoer was in Year 1, it was kind of hard for him and for us to really be ourselves," Lawson said, a second-year captain. "I'm not saying we weren't applying ourselves. We love everything he does for us. We're all in this together, but man, it's just easier now for him to really be able to make what he wants the program to look like and run it how he wants it.
"We're all up for that. I don't know if it was like that with everybody last year."
Grubb was on campus for three weeks in 2024 after agreeing to come with DeBoer to Alabama but ultimately left for the Seahawks' offensive coordinator job.
"I could see there were going to be some rough spots," Grubb said. "You could see there were going to be some guys, and even some people in the building, that were bucking the trend a little bit. That's the part that I felt badly about for the guys, that I wasn't here to help with that.
"It was like, 'If you're all about Alabama, nobody should be fighting trying to be great,' but it was different than it was before [under Saban] and that's where people pause, when it's different. They just stop. And to win at this level, you can't have pause. You've got to have a dead sprint and run right through the wall."
When Grubb returned to Alabama this past January after being fired by the Seahawks, he said he walked into an entirely different environment than what he experienced a year earlier.
"I saw a bunch of hungry kids that wanted to make Alabama football great and that some of the things that were maybe holding them up weren't there anymore," Grubb said. "Transitions take time. Transitions take a ton of energy and investment."
Grubb is eager to invest this season in first-year starting quarterback Ty Simpson, who waited his turn to guide the team and is in his fourth year on campus. Things will look different than a year ago, when Alabama geared the offense around Jalen Milroe's ability to run because he was so explosive.
"That was smart on the staff's part, playing to his strengths," Grubb said. "But Ty is not Jalen, who was such a good athlete and extremely well-built. Ty is plenty athletic enough, but I believe you want your quarterback throwing the ball, leading your offense that way, and not necessarily getting whacked on the inside zone play. There's also a longevity piece there. You're wanting to play 16 games, so you've got to find a way to take care of your quarterback."
In Grubb's two seasons at Washington, Michael Penix Jr. combined for 9,544 passing yards and 67 touchdown passes after being plagued by injuries at Indiana. Penix's top receiver in 2023, Rome Odunze, caught a team-high 92 passes for 1,640 yards and 13 touchdowns. Both were first-round picks in the NFL draft.
"A lot of guys in that receiver room are happy about what we're seeing with this offense," Williams said. "The best thing is we have the depth at receiver that it's going to be hard for defenses to load up on anybody, and Ty is good at getting all of us the ball."
ON THE DEFENSIVE side, Alabama plans to move some guys around more, particularly Overton. He has bulked up to 283 pounds and will play the bandit outside linebacker position, as well as slide inside at times and also rush from a true end position.
"They're trying to make me three-dimensional and target the weakest offensive lineman," Overton said.
One of the biggest differences with this year's defense is the depth, giving Wommack more options in the secondary. He said he has 11 players he feels good about stepping in and playing at either cornerback, nickel or safety.
In last season's loss to Tennessee, Alabama had five defensive backs go down with injuries by the third quarter. Wommack said the Tide didn't have the depth to weather that. They were starting freshman Zabien Brown at cornerback, and another freshman, five-star prospect Dijon Lee, is slated to start at cornerback this season, with Utah transfer Cam Calhoun also factoring into the rotation along with senior holdover Domani Jackson, who started 13 games last season after transferring from USC.
"We're not playing a freshman because we have to. We're playing one, Dijon, because he's the best player," Wommack said. "We had to play Zabien last year. Now Zabien is playing like a total veteran. He's playing with such anticipation."
Junior Bray Hubbard returns at safety along with Keon Sabb and Zavier Mincey, who started out as a cornerback.
"It's great having a bunch of experience back, and not just in the secondary, but guys that have been in the system now going into Year 2," Hubbard said. "It's going to allow us to play faster."
Some of the best news for Alabama's defense is that Lawson is healthy at middle linebacker after tearing his ACL toward the end of last season. He's down to 225 pounds, and according to Wommack, "playing his best football right now."
Alabama played its best defense to close last season. The Tide finished 10th nationally in scoring defense (17.4 points per game), which was the lowest total for an Alabama defense since 2017. The Tide finished fifth nationally with 28 forced turnovers.
But Wommack said his unit can reach another level this season, with playing better complementary defense the key.
"Sometimes our worst moments on defense were the same times we had our worst moments on offense," Wommack said. "We need to be better in those situations."
WHAT FRUSTRATED ALABAMA fans, as well as those within the program, most a year ago was the team's inconsistency. First there was the big win over Georgia followed by the clunker against Vandy and the loss to Tennessee two weeks later. The Tide then won three in a row, including victories over ranked foes Missouri and LSU, and were in prime position to make the playoff heading into a game at 5-5 Oklahoma on the next-to-last week of the regular season. But Alabama turned the ball over three times and lost 24-3.
Lawson pauses when asked if Alabama was undisciplined at times last season. His sense is that the Tide didn't deal with success as well as they had in the past.
"We probably had our best week of practice leading up to the Georgia game and then didn't take the Vandy week as seriously," Lawson said. "I think we were coachable, but you can't let anything slip. It was a hard lesson, but it isn't going to happen again. We'll be ready for everything."
The only current player on Alabama's roster that has won a national championship is sixth-year senior outside linebacker Jah-Marien Latham, something not lost on any of his teammates. After all, Saban never went more than two years without winning a national title until his final season in 2023.
"That's why you come to Alabama, to uphold the standard set by the players that came here before you," Williams said. "That's what Alabama does, win championships."
Lawson said he would have turned pro had he not injured his knee last season. It was a jolt to go down like that, but it gave him another chance to do deliver on a promise he made to himself: Win a national championship.
"I still have that opportunity in front of me and I'm going to do everything in my power to get us back to that," Lawson said. "People can talk about Alabama not being the same or whatever. We'll be the ones to control that."
DeBoer knew what he was signing up for when he came in behind the legendary Saban, who created a monster at Alabama with six national titles. DeBoer was in the national title game in his final season at Washington, and he wants to add to Alabama's trophy collection as much as anybody.
But his motivation is not about redemption for himself in his second year at the highest-pressure job in college football. It's about his players.
"I want it for our players. That's where it starts for me," DeBoer said. "I've always felt that a lot of why I do what I do and the effort that you put in is because you don't want to let these guys down, and that's what you want your whole team to think. You want your staff to think that way, but that's truly how I operate.
"We're not going to let it not be great."