It might not have been immediately evident to a casual passerby who saw the 28-14 score roll across his sports ticker, but for anyone in Bryant-Denny Stadium on Saturday evening, the difference between the 2024 Alabama and Auburn programs looked as wide as the mouth of Mobile Bay.
Alabama lost the turnover battle 4-2 – including 3-0 in the first half – yet it never felt like Auburn threatened the Crimson Tide seriously on Saturday, especially after Alabama forced Auburn to blink at the 3-yard line just before halftime, take a delay-of-game penalty and instead kick a short field goal to cut the score to 14-6. Coming out in the second half, Alabama put together two quality drives, scored two touchdowns and basically ended any hopes Auburn had at pulling the upset, even though Bama still gave Auburn another turnover to work with in the fourth quarter.
For an Alabama team that has experienced both the zenith and the nadir of what a college football season can offer – the peaks of a big win over Georgia in front of every eyeball that college football could muster, and an absolute rat killing in Baton Rouge, but also the valleys of a loss to Vanderbilt and an ugly loss to Oklahoma in which Bama barely showed up to compete – the fact it was able to deliver Kalen DeBoer a win in this series in his debut attempt was an accomplishment in itself. That it looked like this made it even sweeter.
Nick Saban didn’t get the privilege. Neither did Mike Shula nor the aborted tenure of Mike Price. You have to go back to 2001 to Dennis Franchione, where you’d find a similar one-sided Alabama win behind a quarterback (Andrew Zow) who certainly had his detractors coming into the game. Before that, Gene Stallings won a fairly close one in 1990 in his first game – back when it was truly the Iron Bowl and not just a home-and-home rivalry game with a name borrowed to appropriate some of its former glory. And before Stallings turned the trick? That would be one Harold “Red” Drew when the Alabama-Auburn series renewed in 1948. Absent from the list: Some guy from Arkansas who grew up wrestling bears.
If Alabama is picked to go to the College Football Playoff – the percentage chance of it happening can be found by taping 100 balloons to a wall, numbered 1-100, and throwing a dart in their general direction – then that will be a nice accomplishment for DeBoer in his initial season, but few will expect Alabama to advance very far just based on how the Crimson Tide has generally played on the road versus in Bryant-Denny Stadium. If the call doesn’t come, though, the way Alabama got up off the deck after getting decked by Oklahoma, and put this performance on tape at first opportunity, may be something DeBoer can build upon heading into the 2025 season.
There was always going to be some element of transition to navigate in 2024. Things weren’t going to go strictly as planned, and the wins and losses wouldn’t line up neatly according to graphs and spreadsheets and mathematical analysis. There was always going to be some amount of chaos in the batter, and the cake DeBoer baked was unlikely to have won any culinary awards along the way. Such things happen when you’re asked to follow the greatest college football coach to ever draw a breath, and you’re a guy who is still, to some degree, an up-and-comer.
There are many takeaways from the 2024 season, both for fans and coaches alike. DeBoer didn’t just get a baptism in the waters of SEC road games, he was strapped to a chair in a dunking booth while programs lined up to throw fastballs at a bullseye. And they turned out to be pretty good pitchers. He’ll either learn from the experience, or he won’t, but he was never going to know what this ride was like until he bought the ticket. If he’s the guy Greg Bryne thought he was getting when he offered DeBoer the pen to sign his name on the contract, he’ll build on this as he continues to remake the image of team into one that looks more like his own reflection than that of the last coach to sit in the office with the self-closing door.
For those who feel they can’t wait for guys not named Nick Saban to figure out what took Saban himself a decade to learn at the college level, a shrug of the shoulders says what a million words could not. Patience is a virtue, but most of the time it is also a necessity. We’ll find out what Bama truly has for the next era of college football based on the next two or three years of results. For now, what Bama has is its fifth straight victory over Auburn.
Here’s the Five-Point Breakdown for Alabama-Auburn:
1. It was won where most SEC games are won – the two lines of scrimmage. We profiled each team’s defensive line having an advantage over the other team’s offensive line. We were half right. Alabama’s defensive line cratered Auburn’s run-blocking schemes and even though Auburn QB Payton Thorne did a remarkable job of escaping pressure, the fact is he had to do it way too often to be effective. A fourth of Thorne’s 301 yards passing were irrelevant, recorded on the final drive when Alabama was letting Auburn milk its own clock. For a large chunk of the rest of the game, Alabama forced Thorne to abandon half the field as he ran toward one sideline or the other in an effort to escape the onslaught of rushers, many times coming just from a base-four rush look. In all, Alabama recorded an eye-popping 11 QB hurries. What we really didn’t expect, however, was how Alabama’s offensive line turned the tables on Auburn’s defensive line. Tackles Kadyn Proctor and Elijah Pritchett still had their struggles – one of Jalen Milroe’s fumbles came on a whiffed blindside block from Proctor, and Pritchett struggled early before being pulled for Wilkin Formby in the second quarter – but the OL cleaned things up a bit in the second half and did a superb job opening running lanes between the tackles. That even included the maligned Pritchett, who turned things around coming out of the half. This was a return to some old-school concepts, colored in with modern touches. A masterpiece given pregame expectations.
2. Bama stuffed RB Jarquez Hunter, the AU run game in general, and did it with new LB personnel. Justin Jefferson’s performance against Oklahoma in relief of an injured Deontae Lawson was probably his worst of the year, so watching him bounce back against Auburn on Senior Day was especially sweet. Bama held Hunter to the emptiest of yardage, 13 carries for 56 total yards (4.3 avg.) and no scores, with 21 of those yards coming on a single run. To add insult to injury, Alabama sniffed out a halfback gimmick pass from Hunter that resulted in a Bray Hubbard interception that killed an Auburn drive at the 2-yard line. Alabama also held Thorne to 42 yards, and with no other Tiger carrying the ball, it meant Auburn didn’t break the 100-yard mark in rushing. For that, Hugh Freeze deserves a special raspberry for not trying to work the running game more, as Auburn has consistently been harder to handle in 2024 when it took some of the stress off Thorne. On the Bama side, the Tide recorded 5 tackles for loss and a sack, but more importantly the defense seemed to play with more confidence in its assignments. Run fits from the entire linebacker unit were on-point. And a special attaboy here needs to go to CB Domani Jackson, who recorded 8 tackles, broke up 2 passes and recorded a QB hurry on a blitz. When he wasn’t busy keeping receivers from producing, he was absolutely eating up Auburn’s outside running game with good cornerback run-support tactics.
3. Alabama’s offensive play design was as good this week as it was bad last week. This didn’t even look like the same offensive staff as the one that showed up in Norman. In addition to a better general mix of RB runs relative to QB runs, Alabama turned the game into a tight end’s feature event, distributing 8 passes between C.J. Dippre, Robbie Ouzts and Josh Cuevas. Alabama took something as simple as a tight trips formation in the running game (which had the effect of showing WR screen to the defense) and confounded Auburn’s defensive coordinator with it, as Alabama was able to pull backside support off its weakside counter game and open up lanes for its running backs. And then there was the regular stuff – the occasional QB power runs, isolating WR Ryan Williams in space, and featuring Germie Bernard, who has quietly developed into one of the best receivers in the league. Bernard caught 7 passes for 111 yards in this one, forcing Auburn to choose where to send extra help, to him or to Williams. The added flexibility to the offense appeared to make Jalen Milroe more comfortable, and helped him recover from three turnovers without him seeming to sulk about them. Milroe quietly had another double-triple game, 104 yards rushing to go with 256 yards passing. He ran for 3 touchdowns and was sacked only once. This is the kind of thing Alabama was hoping to see when it hired DeBoer in the first place.
4. RB Jam Miller’s stat sheet isn’t flashy, but Bama may not have won without it. Miller carried 28 times – and that’s the number to focus on here – for 84 total yards, just a 3.0-yard-per-carry average. But Miller looked as fresh in the fourth quarter as he did in the first, and Bama’s decisiveness and commitment to running Miller between the tackles had an effect. Oklahoma never had to respect the RB run game last week; Auburn was forced to this week, and it opened things up for Milroe to grab the big gainers. Miller also had a handful of runs that were only 3 or 4 yards long but happened to occur when Alabama had 3 or 4 yards to go for a key first down. Miller has had better production numbers in the past, but this might have been his most important contribution to a win yet. Nate Oats’ basketball team gives out the Hardhat Award every game to the guy who does the most dirty work; give it to Jam Miller in this one.
5. Red zone defense was on-point, and we can’t overstate the importance of the stop on Auburn’s last drive of the first half. Alabama was giving up yardage even before the final drive, but it consistently locked things up the closer drives got to the Bama end zone. Alabama forced Auburn into three field goal attempts, one of which the Tigers missed, and none of those situations was bigger than the drive Alabama stopped in the shadow of its own goal line just before the end of the first half. Not only did Bama stuff Jarquez Hunter on third down, the subsequent, halfhearted attempt to pull Alabama offsides before taking a delay of game and then kicking a field goal appeared to deflate the Tigers. While the field goal pulled Auburn to within 8 points, the next time Auburn’s offense touched the ball, they would do so down 21-6, as Bama’s opening drive of the second half had the impact of a nine-pound sledgehammer hitting an anvil. Alabama’s defense hasn’t always been the prettiest thing in 2024, but it has gotten the job done far more often than it hasn’t.
Follow Jess Nicholas on X at @TideFansJessN