It’s hard to fully explain how much things have changed for Alabama football since the final game of the 2023 season. Nick Saban retired, Kalen DeBoer was hired and the roster and staff have seen big turnover.

Now, spring football is here, with the first one Monday afternoon. Afterward, DeBoer was asked what he expects from his staff at this point in his young tenure.

“There’s a lot of pieces to our job, but right now it’s for us to give them feedback,” DeBoer said. “So they need feedback on everything that happened. The creating of every play and giving the feedback to our guys so they can understand, whether it’s that play, that practice, or the session that we’re in, whether it’s a seven-on-seven period or a team period, even individual. Why did this drill go well?”

DeBoer said the Crimson Tide was excited to begin watching its own film, after mostly being taught using cut-ups of his previous coaching stops. The team will transition from using those cut-ups to impart concepts into more feedback-based film study.

He also said the staff is looking to impact his coaching maxims and pillars of program-building into the current team.

“One of our maxims is to have a relentless pursuit of continuous improvement,” DeBoer said. “We don’t take any of those words lightly, from relentless all the way to pursuit of improvement. That’s the thing I’ll ask our guys tomorrow when we get together and review the practice. Was that the mindset? Was that clear from the beginning to the end?”

He went on to praise how well players have taken coaching at this point in the proceedings.

“We’re very intentional,” DeBoer said.”I’ve said that word a lot. We talk about the coaches job is being to teach, critique and demand. We really talk about the critique part and the demanding part. When we’re pushing a guy and we’re asking more out of him. When we’re coaching them up, that’s a good thing because that means we care and we see that potential in them and that’s our job. I think the guys just really see that and can feel it today.”

Alabama continues spring practice Wednesday. The Crimson Tide wraps spring ball with the annual A-Day game on April 13 at Bryant-Denny Stadium.