Alabama football lost four games in 2024. The Crimson Tide fell to Vanderbilt, Tennessee and Oklahoma in the regular season, then dropped to Michigan in the ReliaQuest Bowl for its first season with less than 10 wins since 2007.

When asked what loss throughout his career keeps him awake at night during a Friday appearance on The Next Round Live, DeBoer first pointed to last season’s failures.

“There were some last year, right?” DeBoer said. “Last year’s, all of them, in different ways, different reasons. I think (about) almost all of the ones I’ve lost.”

But when it came to one that has stuck with him long term, DeBoer went further back him his memory. The answer came during his stint as an NAIA head coach with Sioux Falls.

It was from his first season as a college head coach.

“We lost a game 55-0 in the national semifinal in 2005,” DeBoer said. “We just weren’t good enough. We won the national championship the very next year. but that one, it haunts me just because it was embarrassing at the time and you’re like ‘Wow, we’ve got a long ways to go,’ but that was one of the greatest learning moments that I always still draw on. It was a nightmare at the time, that’s for sure, but we turned it into a positive.”

Sioux Falls finished the 2005 regular season with just one loss. The fourth-seeded Cougars marched through the first two rounds of the NAIA playoffs, sneaking past Saint Xavier 31-28 before blowing out Tabor 48-13 in the quarterfinals.

Then it ran into Carroll College. The Fighting Saints rolled through the regular season undefeated, winning the Frontier Conference and earning the No. 1 seed for the playoffs, where they took down Dickinson State and Montana Tech.

After bulldozing DeBoer’s Sioux Falls squad in the semifinals, Carroll went on to beat Saint Francis in the national championship game.

But, like DeBoer said, the Cougars weren’t done building. Sioux Falls went undefeated and won the 2006 national championship, the first of three it would win under the current Alabama coach.

Carroll returned and beat the Cougars in the 2007 national title game, but DeBoer got the last laugh, winning the rematch in the 2008 championship. After repeating as champions in 2009, the coach moved to the FBS ranks, and took the offensive coordinator job at Southern Illinois.