The Alabama Crimson Tide is a football team in search of an identity

Week 9 of a college football season is a late time for a team to be searching for its identity. Unfortunately, that is exactly where the Alabama Crimson Tide is heading into Saturday's game against Missouri.

Kennington Smith III, writing for The Athletic, recently discussed the difficulty of defining the 2024 Alabama football team. One word he said applies is inconsistency: "The Crimson Tide have produced championship-level stretches throughout the season, but there’s inconsistency at every turn."

Many Alabama football fans search for an answer to the inconsistencies in the transition from Nick Saban to Kalen DeBoer. Matt Hayes, writing for USA Today Sports states Alabama's current problems go back to last season and an Alabama team "that had gone astray from its Saban-led-and-fed roots and was winning games on pure talent."

Others, including me, are convinced Alabama's current slide began before the 2023 season. To what extent and exactly when, does not much matter. What matters is that the legitimate college football GOAT could not prevent it from happening. One of Nick Saban's most precise definitions of the essential requirements for championship success came in 2021, "There are 3 things we can't have, We can't have complacency, we can't have selfishness, and we can't lose our accountability."

Alabama Crimson Tide 'Potential and Results'

Has there been decay to the point, that the ingredients defined by Saban are a serious deficiency in the 2024 Alabama Crimson Tide? I'm not offering an answer, but I think Tyler Booker may have provided one after the loss to Tennessee, "I wholeheartedly believe that we have the potential to win a national championship this year, but potential is nothing without result. We are a decent team with a lot of potential, and we have to continue to tap into that potential." Booker is an outstanding leader. His words can reassure Alabama football fans. But to borrow an old Saban term, not understanding 'where your feet are' until Week 9 is alarming.

Nick Saban provided the necessary course of action a few years ago, when he said, "You gotta embrace hard. Hard times make tough people" There should be no doubt Kalen DeBoer knows and believes in exactly what Saban described. On Saturdays to come, we'll find out how much the 2024 Crimson Tide understands and has embraced hard.