What Kalen DeBoer wants Alabama to take from victory over South Carolina

Every college football fan remembers Alabama football’s 2024 failures, highlighted by a loss to Vanderbilt for the first time in nearly two decades and an embarrassing loss to an Oklahoma team where Alabama failed to score a touchdown.

In the eyes of the media, fans and the great Nick Saban, Alabama’s game versus South Carolina fit the bill a “trap game” like most people say these days. The nationwide belief is that one of the scariest things in October is facing an opponent whose season is in the toilet due to a bad record, and it was looking like Alabama was going to be victim of other field rush as the South Carolina students crowded the barricades, but the Crimson Tide dug down deep and pulled out the victory to officially cement their claim that the 2024 Alabama remains in the past.

“It’s not good when you’re in the moment, but it’s a good feeling right now because you’re going to take the experiences and how you did it, and that’s going to add to the belief you have,” DeBoer said. “You just got to be mindful that it didn’t happen on its own. You had to go make it happen. You had to strain. You had to get your cleats in the direct and really lock in. Again, everyone’s got to do their job. And so, these moments stack on top of themselves, and more times than not, they’ve been positive, and that’s what we’ve got to ride in. I’m excited about what it’s going to look like practicing because you know, there’s just probably as much juice I’ve seen in the locker room right now over the course in the last five weeks I think.”

Entering Saturday’s game, Alabama was on a hot streak against ranked conference opponents, defeating four in a row. This game was a test for Alabama and DeBoer as the narrative surrounding him and the program was that Alabama struggles on the road against opponents with inferior records.

Yes, Alabama did look bad at times, but all that matters to the team is pulling out the victory. To DeBoer, last week was not the end of the challenging “stretch” as he believes the Crimson Tide are still in it.

“I think we’ve understood what this sequence of games was going to be like and just knew that like I said earlier, we’re in the stretch,” DeBoer said. “We’re not through the stretch. We’re right in it. So again, we’ll be back in it real soon, but happy that we have a little bye week to get some guys rested.”

Alabama will play LSU in two weeks, and that game will potentially be a matchup of two ranked teams.