Happy Monday, everyone. Baseball is the 9-seed for the SEC Tournament this week after dropping two of three in Gainesville, and softball is headed to Norman to take on the juggernaut Oklahoma Sooners in Super Regional play after taking care of business at home.
If you have the SEC Network, you can watch a documentary of Alabama’s 2025 spring camp tonight.
That sounds like something you’d probably like to watch.
Alabama offensive players have been putting in work.
Many noted that Ryan Williams was not there, but he was nursing a minor injury at the end of camp.
Alabama and Tennessee led the way in spending on recruiting last season.
Tennessee led the SEC in football recruiting spending during Fiscal Year 2024. The Volunteers spent $5.4 million in the category, according to financial reports submitted to the NCAA by the league’s 15 public schools, obtained by AL.com via a series of open records requests.
Alabama came in just below Tennessee. The Crimson Tide spent $5.3 million on football recruiting during FY 2024, a large jump from the previous fiscal year, when UA shelled out $2.9 million in the category.
ESPN put out a big preview for you at the 100 day mark before “week zero.”
Replacing Nick Saban at Alabama was always going to be a unique conundrum because it’s completely unfair to expect anyone to replace the greatest college football coach of all time. The coach who came after Saban was going to be measured against him. That’s just how this works. While that dynamic is probably unfair, that doesn’t make DeBoer’s task any easier. He left a place where the external pressure would be relatively nonexistent for the foreseeable future after leading Washington to a national title game appearance in his second season. The Crimson Tide were disappointing last year, but it also made sense that Year 1 was transitional as Saban’s shadow still loomed quite large. That will be the case for a long time, to varying degrees, but now that there has been adequate time to shape the roster into his own vision, it will be interesting to see how Alabama looks in Year 2 under DeBoer
Ryan WIlliams is listed as a darkhorse Heisman candidate in there.
Alabama is in hot pursuit of a top flight 2026 WR.
Since the Kalen DeBoer era began at Alabama, Morgan has always been a priority for the Crimson Tide. And Morgan said he’s consistently felt that love, from his introduction to wide receivers coach JaMarcus Shephard at Benjamin Russell last spring and the offer that came after he participated in a recruiting camp in Tuscaloosa last May, to the present, with less than a month-and-a-half before a commitment.
Morgan praised Shephard as a coach who is “going to push you to do your best and get you to reach limits that you have never reached before.” But Morgan’s feelings about Alabama are much simpler than just about development.
“Their tradition of winning,” Morgan said. “You think of Alabama, you just think about winning. And I want to be a part of winning, so that’s why they are on my list”
Last, for whatever reason, USC transfer Desmond Claude decided not to come to Tuscaloosa this weekend after all. Here’s what Nate Oats had to say about it.
“We’re getting to the end. I gotta hurry it up and hire an assistant,” Oats said. “The roster spot, we’ve got 11 really good players, so if we fill another spot, and we could really fill two if we wanted − kind of with the NIL, how much you’ve got left, we’ll see − but we would be good going in with 11. You’ve seen the injuries we’ve had in the past. It’d be a little better if we could at least add one more.”
Expecting an official visit from USC transfer guard Desmond Claude this weekend, Oats isn’t in a “huge rush” to fill that extra slot.
“We’re definitely not going to take anybody that wouldn’t be a good fit and isn’t a high-character young man,” Oats said.
Maybe we’re just poor.
That’s about it for today. Have a great week.
Roll Tide.
