In 2024, Alabama football was consistent in its inconsistency.

One week, a team that could beat anybody in the country showed up. The next, a team that looked beatable and average might make an appearance.

It happened from the Georgia game to the Vanderbilt game. And then later in the season, after a dominant win over LSU (and a cupcake against Mercer), Alabama went to Oklahoma and put together its worst game of the season with a 24-3 loss.

The first season of Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer’s tenure was marred with inconsistency. High highs and low lows. How does Alabama fix that heading into his second season?

“I think there’s different reasons for it throughout the course of the year,” DeBoer said Sunday. “Different position groups might have been hit by different things that affected them throughout that week. It might have been the matchups and some of those things that were greater challenges. It might have been flow of the game. Just a lot of things you control. That’s what we’ve got to focus on. That’s what we always focus on. Those that we can control. Things we can’t control or the the breaks that don’t go your way, we’ve just got to make sure we’re stronger because of what we went through.”

DeBoer expects having a full offseason will provide valuable benefits for the Crimson Tide. Last year, DeBoer arrived in mid January after Nick Saban retired. His focus had to be on keeping the roster intact as much as possible while trying to hire an almost completely new staff, all while moving to a new place. Coaches do it often in this business when they arrive in new places, but it’s always easier in offseasons when they don’t have to.

“I think having an offseason where there’s some consistency and a longer period of time to be able to do what I would normally do in an offseason, whether it’s the details you’d be starting in the middle of January or the end of January,“ DeBoer said. ”We pretty much hired our whole staff in the middle of February. Trying to just get them to learn the offense and defensive schemes. The time frame and the build up. The ability now to, after one year, just grow the relationships, which builds trust, which leads to greater confidence. It’s just all part of the process … We want to skip steps. You feel like in a lot of places you can, and I think we did in some areas. But there are some areas too, as agonizing as it is sometimes, you’ve just got to go through those tough times to really know how it can help you in the long run.”

Nick Kelly is an Alabama beat writer for AL.com and the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on X and Instagram.