Six Teams That Can Win The 2025 College Football National Championship: #4 Alabama Crimson Tide

We’ve covered Penn State Clemson Texas

It’s time to talk Tide. Maybe that’s not the second SEC team you were expecting to see here given last year’s fall from grace, but there’a a lot to like about Bama.

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Last year they finished with a 9-4 record, including a pathetic bowl game no-show against Michigan and upsets at the hands of Vanderbilt and Oklahoma. They also showed their ceiling at times: beating Georgia, edging South Carolina, and humiliating LSU and Missouri. But their floor never firmed up.

Kalen DeBoer arrived in Tuscaloosa in January, 2024 with a new staff and a more laid back approach, with his entire roster being courted (and leaving) in the portal, a substantial number of them feeling slighted after taking the Saban discount and learning their “true value.”

When players like Caleb Downs, Isaiah Bond, Trey Amos and Kaden Proctor portaled out (Proctor later returned), the administration panicked, Bama paid up, and agreed to meet some other demands.

DeBoer’s tenure began from a position of weakness, the motivating fear of Saban was removed, and some of the Tide players took advantage of a shifting power dynamic to assert their independence in destructive ways.

That includes a starting QB who was a much better athlete than passer who didn’t like being told that he hadn’t mastered the art of quarterbacking. Buy-in wasn’t great.

Some of those players moved on to the NFL, a lot of them – quite a few of them under performers – left in the portal. DeBoer is now back in control.

In control of what?

A lot of talent.

Besides last year’s 9-4, there’s another relevant number when assessing the 2025 Tide: 33.

That’s how many former Top 100 recruits remain on the Alabama roster. The most in the SEC (Georgia is #2, Texas is #3). Keegan Pope explains:

With a combination of holdovers from the Nick Saban’s final few recruiting classes and last year’s inaugural crop under Kalen DeBoer, the Tide continue to lead the SEC when it comes to elite talent on the roster. Of the 33 former top-100 players, 15 are five-stars.

No team has a deeper defense, their OL is loaded, DeBoer’s sidekick Ryan Grubb is back on the staff, the receiving corps is a Top 5 unit nationally (Williams, Bernard, Horton) and substantially upgraded from last year.

The big concern is QB. The potential for an upgrade is real if the replacement – RS JR Ty Simpson – can throw accurate balls on time to where he’s being coached to do so. If he can’t, they have other options.

Jalen Milroe was good at highlight plays, but terrible at mundane ones. The new QB just needs to handle the mundane, Ryan Williams will take care of the highlights.

Alabama meets all of the needed unsexy infrastructure demands of a national champion on the lines of scrimmage and in the secondary, DeBoer has done enough in his career (113-16 all-time record) to get a pass for last year, and they’re one more edge rusher and some smart QB play away from being a real handful.

Their schedule is doable. I like them opening in Tallahassee against a desperate Florida State if it brings some focus and I favor them to pull the road upset in Athens. Georgia isn’t going to bully Alabama on the line of scrimmage. It might go the other way, in fact.

Nits to pick? Kane Wommack is a good DC who struggled to attack predictable play calls in high leverage moments. Watching Jackson Arnold run QB Power on 3rd and 3 against an honest box got a little tedious.

If Alabama underperforms again, we’ll know that there’s something rotten in Tuscaloosa, but don’t be shocked by a Texas-Bama SEC title game.

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