If you’re a longtime reader who followed us from the old digs, thank you. And if you’re completely new to this weekly college football feature full of schadenfreude and pithiness, we can guarantee you’re going to love it here.
Because as much as college football has changed since we started this more than a decade ago, one thing will always remain the same: There is no experience in sports like the anguish of rooting for a program that isn’t living up to expectations while all your rivals revel in your misfortune.
[Join or create a Yahoo Fantasy Football league for the 2025 NFL season]
Our job is to find those moments of misery every week, but the truth is we don’t have to look very hard most of the time.
Thanks to teams like Alabama.
Let’s start with the good news: It’s awfully nice for the young people who never saw what Mike Shula’s teams were like to get a slice of nostalgia.
Or maybe nausea.
Folks, we’re opening the 2025 season with a true Misery Index banger, maybe even an all-timer. A mere 14 games into the post-Nick Saban era, Alabama football is in crisis.
Did the Crimson Tide hire the wrong guy?
That’s the question the school will have to confront — urgently — in the wake of a 31-17 loss to Florida State.
Kalen DeBoer may have a $70 million buyout, but is that any more expensive than the university whose reputation is more closely tied football than anywhere in the country slipping into “Just Another Program” territory so quickly on the heels of Saban’s historic run?
Alabama didn’t just lose an opener, it got de-pantsed in a way that shows there’s fundamental weakness in the program. And it all points directly to the head coach.
It would be one thing if Alabama just didn’t execute offensively or turned the ball over a bunch and lost on a fluke, but that wasn’t what happened. Florida State made the Tide look soft and slow, and it showed up at the line of scrimmage, where the Seminoles had 230 rushing yards while Alabama got very little out of the ground game (74 yards on 29 attempts) and did a poor job protecting quarterback Ty Simpson, who was running for his life way too often.
Mind you, Florida State was 2-10 last year. If Mike Norvell could fix those issues in one offseason, why couldn’t DeBoer level up after a year in which inexplicable losses to Oklahoma and Vanderbilt kept Alabama out of the College Football Playoff?
If anything, the Tide took a step backward Saturday to a fourth loss as a double-digit favorite in 14 games under DeBoer.