Many national writers have spent the last month wishcasting for chaos and uncertainty in Tuscaloosa with Alabama and Kalen DeBoer.
The second-year coach was supposedly "coaching for his job" in the Iron Bowl against Auburn. A loss might have led DeBoer to seek an off-ramp to Penn State, and Alabama may not have fought to keep him. Of course, that ignores DeBoer publicly squashing rumors of his interest in any other jobs.
That didn't stop the rumors from kicking back up in the aftermath of the SEC Championship Game and Michigan's decision to move on from Sherrone Moore. According to many - with zero credible reporting as backing - the future of the DeBoer era in Tuscaloosa hinged on the result of the opening round of the College Football Playoff at Oklahoma.
Per Sports Illustrated's Pat Forde, the Wolverines were working backchannels for a period of time before firing Moore on December 10th.
And according to Forde, on December 2nd, just three days after Alabama defeated Auburn in the Iron Bowl, and four days before it faced Georgia in the SEC Championship Game, Tide Athletic Director Greg Byrne flew to Louisville, Kentucky. Forde theorizes that Byrne may have been meeting in secret with Jeff Brohm or his agent, though Byrne told Forde he was in town to meet with a prominent Alabama booster:
"On the afternoon of Dec. 2, Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne flew into Muhammad Ali International Airport in Louisville," Forde writes. "If Byrne thought he was losing his football coach, was he making a preemptive move to meet with Brohm and/or his Louisville-based agent, Shawn Freibert?
"I got Byrne on the phone that day. He said he was in town to visit an Alabama donor. I’ve known Byrne a long time and I’ll take him at his word. But the timing of that visit is more interesting in retrospect, when placed within the context of rumors out of Michigan about Moore’s status and how it might impact DeBoer’s tenure at Alabama."
Pat Forde's piece is more conjecture than reporting about Greg Byrne and Alabama
With due respect to Pat Forde, who is an excellent writer and reporter I have followed for years, there's way too much conjecture and not enough real reporting in his piece to take it seriously.
The timeline makes zero sense to begin with.
Why would Byrne fly out to meet with a potential coaching candidate after Alabama beat Auburn and effectively clinched its spot in the College Football Playoff? Two days after Byrne was in Louisville, DeBoer shut down the Penn State rumors in a press conference.
College football coaching searches are effectively espionage, particularly before the openings are real. Back-channel negotiations and discussions happen all the time. There's no denying that.
If Byrne were seriously courting another coach in case DeBoer decided to leave, he would be doing that through back-channel operations and phone calls - not flying Alabama's private jet into Muhammad Ali International Airport. That's not exactly a stealthy move for a veteran athletic director.
It's not sexy and doesn't make for the story that Forde wrote, but the reality is that what Byrne said he was doing was almost certainly what he was doing. It's Occam's Razor; the simplest answer is almost always the right answer, even in the wild west of college football.