Every Monday, we present “Tide Takes”, where we’ll get into a different topic on the Crimson Tide, break down the previous game, preview the upcoming game, and everything in between.

The Alabama Crimson Tide has officially come to the end of the first season of the Kalen DeBoer era.

After an up-and-down year that saw the highest of highs and the lowest of lows, the Tide finishes with a 9-3 record and a playoff fate that’s now out of their own hands. While the team very well may make the 12-team field, they likely are not good enough to win a national title. It would not be a huge shock to see them lose on the road in the first round.

Playoff aspirations aside: How should DeBoer be evaluated after his first season in Tuscaloosa?

It’s easy to forget now, but prior to the season, Alabama was a slight underdog to make the playoff, with a Vegas over/under of 9.5 wins. While DeBoer’s first Alabama team fell just shy of that and the playoff remains a mystery, this wasn’t the complete disaster of a season that some have argued it was.

After DeBoer’s squad passed their first real test with flying colors and continued the Nick Saban dominance of Georgia with a mostly resounding victory over the Bulldogs in September, those preseason expectations felt a long way from where they were and many immediately saw Alabama as a national title favorite.

Fast forward one week later to the disaster at Vanderbilt and it became clear that this was a flawed team capable of beating anyone on their best day and losing to anyone on their worst. Not exactly a recipe for a surefire playoff / national title team.

RELATED: How Alabama can still make the College Football Playoff

The truth of the matter is, that while DeBoer created some momentum on the recruiting trail after the initial mass exodus of players in the portal, this was a team that lacked necessary depth. More importantly, lacked a quarterback capable of running the kind of offense DeBoer wants to run at the highest level.

While the Vanderbilt game falls more so on the defense, both the Tennessee and Oklahoma losses were offensive collapses at the highest level, something that falls on the quarterback. For two years now, the Tide has gone as Jalen Milroe goes, and if he had an off day – something that happened frequently – Alabama rarely overcame it.

DeBoer can be grateful to Milroe for helping to lead the transition, but he can be grateful while simultaneously ushering him out the door. It’s not to say that every issue for Alabama this season was on Milroe – it wasn’t. But as DeBoer heads into year two looking for more success than he had in year one, he needs an elite distributor of the football.

The 2024 Alabama Crimson Tide is a case study in fan expectations running amok when the reality was a good not great team, and that’s regardless of what happens with the playoff. And that doesn’t mean fans shouldn’t expect DeBoer to continue the winning legacy, because that’s what he was brought here to do.

But give the man some time to establish his program, identify and bring in players to fit his system, and ultimately hopefully win big doing it his way.