This is an opinion column.

Of all the things we learned about new Alabama football coach Kalen DeBoer in the last week, a nugget he shared during his formal introduction Saturday in Tuscaloosa stands out.

He said he had never met Nick Saban or Greg Byrne before Saban announced his retirement last Wednesday afternoon and Byrne got on a plane headed west in search of Saban’s successor.

If you have any sense of Crimson Tide history, you realize just how extraordinary this fun fact is. There was a time when it would’ve disqualified a man from an Alabama football coaching search from the start.

Byrne found his man about as far away as possible in every conceivable way. If that outside-the-box approach works as well with DeBoer as it has with Nate Oats, given the historical ceiling of Alabama football relative to Alabama basketball, they’ll be adding a statue to the Walk of Champions in the near future.

Make no mistake. That’s the standard. That’s what Alabama football has proved it can do, from 1925 to 2020, when it combines the power of the brand with the leadership of the right man in charge.