We’re a little more than six weeks away from the opening of Alabama’s football season, but the post-mortem examination of 2024 continued on Wednesday.

Crimson Tide head coach Kalen DeBoer took the stage at SEC Media Days in Atlanta, acknowledging that his team’s 9-4 finish a year ago — which included road losses to Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Oklahoma and a bowl game defeat to Michigan — didn’t live up to the program’s lofty standards. Following DeBoer’s Q&A with the media, SEC Network analyst Paul Finebaum hypothesized during SEC Now that Alabama’s biggest problem in 2024 might have been that it never quite got past its stunning victory over top-ranked Georgia in late September.

“Not to sound like a guy who’s covered every Alabama coach since Paul Bryant, but … I have seen this movie every single time,” said Finebaum, who first covered the Crimson Tide for the Birmingham Post-Herald in 1980 and has done so in newspapers on radio or on television each year since. “Every Alabama coach has lost four games or more (in Year 1), and the reason is very simple — they don’t understand the magnitude of the job. They can get up there at the opening press conference (and say), ‘It’s an honor to be here where Nick Saban and Bear Bryant and all these other guys have been,’ but they don’t know what they’re doing in certain situations.

“And what happened to him last year was classic. (DeBoer) beats Georgia in one of the great wins in Alabama history, and you know what he was doing four days later? … He was appearing on the Paul Finebaum Show talking about the Georgia win, and the Vanderbilt game never came up. And I’m not staying he misread it, but he couldn’t stop talking about it because everybody was talking about it.

At Vanderbilt, you saw what happened. Why did they lose three times on the road or at neutral sites as a two-touchdown favorite? Because they just weren’t locked in. … And that is why they failed.”

Finebaum also noted the addition of new offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb, who fielded one of the top offenses in the country during DeBoer’s tenure at Washington, but spent last season in the NFL. He also said the departure of quarterback Jalen Milroe — who was “as bad as he was at times as he was good” — might make a positive difference.

Fellow SEC Network analyst Roman Harper — a former All-SEC safety at Alabama — also weighed in. He said, the 2024 Crimson Tide team will always be remembered for its “up and down” nature — something that was rarely an issue in the Nick Saban era.

“When you look like probably the best team we’ve seen in college football in the last 15 years, the first half of Georgia, everybody was like ‘Wow, who is this unbelievable. Nick who?,’ and then you followed up by losing the Vanderbilt on the road when you haven’t lost to Vanderbilt in 40 years,” Harper said. “But then also LSU, you look like world-beaters versus LSU on the road at night in Death Valley. You couldn’t believe it. And then you lose to Oklahoma, who couldn’t score.

It’s just back and forth, back and forth. And then, ‘OK, well at least you’ll have Michigan to finish it off on a good note. Michigan is not even playing their starters.’ … And you lose that game too because you can’t (score). These are the things that have you so frustrated, but the Michigan loss really just signed the deal for exactly who this team was last year — that they were the ups and downs, the peaks in the valleys. You can’t have them. You’ve got to have something in the middle, but they weren’t.”