In sports, you look for motivation in any way it can be provided. For Alabama football, they haven't had to look far to find it this offseason.
Since the embarrassing 38-3 blowout loss in the Rose Bowl to Indiana, there's been nothing but doubt about Kalen DeBoer and the future of the Crimson Tide. That one loss overshadowed an 11-win season and the first road win in the history of the College Football Playoff.
Alabama will almost certainly begin the season with its lowest preseason ranking in the AP Poll since 2008.
Last week at SEC Media Days, the Crimson Tide was picked to finish sixth in the conference. According to former Bama RB Trent Richardson, that's gold for DeBoer:
"If you got any part of that Crimson blood in you, you should definitely feel like this is a slap in the face, and it should definitely be motivation," Richardson said, via The Dynasty podcast.
Trent Richardson calls Alabama's preseason SEC ranking a 'slap in the face'
With five SEC teams making the College Football Playoff field last year, you can see that a sixth-place finish would indicate the Crimson Tide would be on the outside looking in. Making the playoff has felt like a bare-minimum expectation for most fans, despite how young this Alabama group will be.
DeBoer and his staff are loaded with things to use to motivate this team. There has been a whole lot of talk this offseason about Alabama never being Alabama again. This just adds to it.
DeBoer is not afraid to use failure as motivation. During spring practice, several Tide players were using Rose Bowl towels. That wasn't an accident. That loss to Indiana stung, and it was a stark reality check of how far Alabama needs to come to get back to being a championship-quality program. That's what they faced in Pasadena, and they came up way, way short.
Richardson hopes the SEC media's lack of faith in the 2026 Crimson Tide will be used as motivation during fall camp:
"That would be up in every locker room, every locker," Richardson said. "That would be up over every weightlifting bench, station, everybody’s door. It would be the screensaver on my phone when I was in school, you know what I’m saying?
"...This is it right here. Like, you got people really - I ain’t gonna say not scared of us, but they’re not scared of us. But at the same time, it’s like we got to put up or shut up.”
Talking season is coming to a close. Alabama will open fall camp next week and have the chance to start the grind toward the regular season. Nobody is going to change their opinion of this team overnight. It's going to take consistent results during the season to do that.
And Alabama will have to leave no doubt. Because a lot of the media has been praying for this program's downfall for many years. It's up to DeBoer and this team to disappoint them.
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