Alabama senior defender is ‘putting his foot down’ after admitting last year’s team didn’t live up to the Crimson Tide standard
The Alabama Crimson Tide didn;t look like themselves in 2024.
And sure, the losses to Oklahoma and Vanderbilt didn’t help, but it was the little things that turned major.
The distractions, and the visible erosion of Nick Saban’s culture made many upset.
And now, leaders at the Capstone are vowing to get Alabama back where it belongs…
LT Overton putting his foot down
“I felt like, me coming in last year, especially us transfers — [center] Parker [Brailsford], as an example — we have this conversation all the time. I feel like we didn’t have much say,” Overton said on the Crimson Tide Sports Network’s “Hey Coach” radio show. “It’s different coming in from a different program, coming into Alabama, like, the standard of college football. “Now we realize we have a say. We put our stamp. We put our foot down on a lot of things, making sure that everybody goes by the standard of Alabama.”
Wheter it was Malachi Moore throwing tantrums at the end of games, or wide receivers having costly penalties at the worst times, the Tide didn’t look right. The discipline, the attitude, the standard, it was all off.
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It created a lot of flak for Kalen DeBoer, who was just trying to keep his head above water as the man replacing the greatest coach to ever put on a headset in college football.
But some of his comments didn’t help either.
“There have been some times, (been a lot of times, right,) where sometimes our awareness, or just understanding emotional discipline at times as well, just has has been something we haven’t been as sharp as we need to be,” said DeBoer when asked about his team’s discipline. “I think we’ve gotten extremely better. But you know, there’s still things that are happening that we’ve just got to continue to improve on sometimes, because I see it in practice every once in a while too…
“…Guys are just trying so hard, in some ways, to do a really good job of executing. Maybe they’re frustrated about something that happened the play before, and they have to get their mind flipped to the next thing. And, you know, every guy’s got their little thing that maybe has caused them to have that moment. There are moments that we can’t have, that we talk about every weekend, and we would be doing that whether it was a problem or not.”
So maybe everyone just needs another year on the job. More time to get their feet wet and realize the honor that has been bestowed upon them. Because fans won’t tolerate another sub-par season, but they certainly won’t tolerate the culture they saw on the field far too often in 2024.
