Happy Monday, everyone. Alabama basketball won its game with Kennesaw State yesterday, though the second half wasn’t pretty. They now get a week off before facing Yale next Monday in the final tune-up
for SEC play.
After beating Oklahoma, the football team has a Rose Bowl date with Indiana.
Prep your calendars and your travel plans. Alabama has a game time and TV set for the Rose Bowl.
The No. 9 Crimson Tide (11-3) will face No. 1 Indiana (13-0) at 3 p.m. CT on Thursday, Jan. 1, 2026 at Rose Bowl Stadium in Pasadena, California, in the quarterfinals of the College Football Playoff. The game will be broadcast on ESPN.
The game will be played 100 years to the day in the same venue where Alabama won its first national championship. The Tide beat Kalen DeBoer’s prior employer, the Washington Huskies, on January 1, 1926. This time, they will be facing a former Saban assistant whose father played a hand in launching Nick’s career.
Cignetti joined Saban’s first staff at Alabama in 2007 after spending seven seasons as a recruiting coordinator, tight ends coach and quarterbacks coach at NC State.
But Cignetti’s connection with Saban began well before he was hired.
Saban was hired by Frank Cignetti, Curt’s father, at West Virginia as a defensive backs coach. Saban worked on Frank Cignetti’s final two Mountaineers staffs in 1978 and 1979 before he left for a defensive backs coaching position at Ohio State in 1980.
Cignetti has his team playing a brand of football that would make Saban proud, which hasn’t always been the case for this Alabama squad.
“One thing that I prided ourselves in, when we played Georgia in the SEC championship game, it was two physical teams,” Saban said, according to Mike Rodak of 247Sports. “It was disappointing to me to see how much more physical Georgia’s team was in the SEC championship game than Alabama’s was. ”That’s why they can’t run the ball. You got to be able to win on the line of scrimmage on both sides of the ball.”
A verbal gut punch to the mentality Saban built in his time before joining the media.
Essentially, called them soft.
Alabama still didn’t have much of a running game against Oklahoma, but the defense was hitting and Ty Simpson was able to do just enough through the air to help the Tide advance.
“A lot of times it’s just guys making plays and just continuing to stay the course,” DeBoer said. “We just talked about that so much this off-season. A couple things, just what we were going to do and how you chip away. You can’t go score a 17-point touchdown. You’ve got to go score one score.”
When Simpson hit Brooks for the first touchdown of his young career, Alabama got its one score. After an OU drive stuttered and Tim Keenan blocked a punt, the Tide got more points, a Conor Talty field goal.
By the end of the half, the defense had contributed to the score, when Zabien Brown picked off John Mateer and tied the game at 17. The offense had life, the defense was working and the momentum had totally shifted.
“There wasn’t a doubt in my mind at all,” Simpson said. “The guys that we have, the players, the coaches, like 17-0 is nothing to us. Give us the ball; we’ll go down, do what we do. Give them the ball, they’ll go down and do what they do. That’s all.”
It goes without saying that Alabama will need to play much better, especially early in the game, to have a chance against the unbeaten and top ranked Hoosiers.
The Tide struggled to run the ball (again), save for one 30-yard Daniel Hill run. Their O-line struggled to handle blitzes (again), and their receivers dropped passes (again). A team prone to self-inflicted mistakes could be in for a long day against Curt Cignetti’s extremely disciplined Hoosiers.
But that’s assuming we get the same versions of those teams come Jan. 1. Last year’s quarterfinals saw the teams coming off a longer break (Indiana’s will be 26 days by then) go 0-4, and another 13-0 Big Ten champion, No. 1 Oregon, looked like a shell of its former self in the Rose Bowl. Perhaps Fernando Mendoza and the Hoosiers come out similarly rusty.
There’s a big difference, though, between the veteran-led, dripping-with-talent Ohio State team that waxed the Ducks last year and an Alabama squad that’s relying heavily on youth and trying to duct-tape its running game. Never thought I’d write these words, but: Indiana is a bad matchup for Alabama.
Last, Nick Sheridan has agreed to become the offensive coordinator at Michigan State after the season.
“He and Ryan Grubb, their relationship is amazing,” DeBoer said of Sheridan in July. “Again, it goes back to two strong years that they had together putting together elite offenses there at Washington, too. Seeing these guys come together, pick each other’s brains. Nick has been able to share along with the rest of the staff, JaMarcus Shephard, with coach Grubb, Ryan Grubb, what they felt, why they did things. Myself as well. It’s helped us take those next steps.”
In 2025, Sheridan has coached quarterback Ty Simpson to a season in which he’s thrown for 3,500 yards, 28 touchdowns and five interceptions. Also, Sheridan was the primary recruiter who landed five-star freshman quarterback Keelon Russell.
Sheridan had previously worked with DeBoer at Indiana. He became the offensive coordinator and quarterbacks coach in Bloomington after DeBoer left to take the head coach job at Fresno State.
Best of luck to him.
That’s about it for today. Have a great week.
Roll Tide.
