The college football offseason recently got underway, and so far, the biggest news has been surrounding the Alabama football team. The Crimson Tide have lost their legendary head coach, Nick Saban, as he decided to retire when the season came to a close. Alabama has since hired Kalen DeBoer from Washington to replace Saban. Saban is one of the best head coaches to ever do it, and Crimson Tide fans are certainly going to miss him.
This news obviously centers around the Alabama football team, but it is so big that is moving over to other sports as well. On Saturday, Alabama basketball hit the road for a big matchup with Tennessee basketball, and Volunteers fans used Saban’s retirement as some fuel.
Tennessee is ranked #6 in the country right now and they are a terrific basketball team, so they handled Alabama fairly easily. Near the end of the game, the Volunteers had a big lead on the Crimson Tide as they were up by 25 points with a little under four minutes to go. The student section at Tennessee took the opportunity and broke out a “where’s Nick Saban” chant. The Volunteers went on to win the game 91-71.
While Saban was at Alabama, his Crimson Tide teams didn’t lose to Tennessee very often, and they certainly never lost the way that the basketball team did on Saturday. Volunteers fans are hoping that now that Saban is gone, they will start to win some more games against Alabama in the future. It will be interesting to see what DeBoer can do with Alabama, and it will be weird to see the Crimson Tide play without Saban on the sidelines.
Now that football is over, the Alabama basketball team will be on center stage for the school until March. They can expect to hear similar chants throughout the season as the entire SEC is thrilled that their teams won’t have to go up against Saban anymore, and the Crimson Tide basketball team will likely hear a lot of chirps about it.
