Happy Monday, everyone. The biggest news of the weekend was the commitment of 2028 EDGE Tysir Young, from Delaware of all places.
Young is a four-star edge prospect at Middletown High School. The 247Sports composite ranks him as the No. 13 edge in the 2028 class, and the No. 105 overall player in the group.
Young announced his pledge to Alabama on social media. He announced his offer from the Crimson Tide in March.
The 6-foot-2, 220-pound Young became Alabama’s seventh commitment in the 2028 recruiting class, picking the Tide over offers from Auburn, Boston College, Cincinnati and Duke among others.. The group is currently ranked No. 1 in the nation by 247Sports.
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Best I can tell, the Saban era featured zero recruits from The First State. Guess he just couldn’t recruit nationally quite like Kalen can.
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Hunter De Siver took a look at the WR group.
For the second consecutive year, sophomore Derek Meadows is Alabama’s tallest wide receiver, standing at 6-foot-5. He’s a WR3 candidate because of his large catch radius and the advantages that come with it in the red zone and jump balls. Additionally, he had by far the most targets at A-Day with nine, resulting in five catches for 69 yards and a touchdown. DeBoer said on April 6 that Meadows “has had some big plays throughout the whole spring,” and Coleman-Williams said after A-Day that Meadows’ performance was “nothing that I didn’t expect” due to him being “super consistent.”
6-foot-4 freshman Cederian Morgan also had a couple of wild plays at A-Day, including a touchdown near the corner of the end zone, and a 40-yard catch-and-run — the longest gain by any player. Coleman-Williams shared that Morgan’s nickname is “The Gulf of Mexico” because, “You throw it in there, he’s going to catch it. He’s got plenty of space.” Coleman-Williams also gushed about Morgan at SEC Media Days for his eagerness to “learn all areas of the game,” while All-SEC First Team safety Bray Hubbard believes Morgan is “going to have a huge role in our offense.”
Nick Kelly wrote about how Ryan Coleman-Williams is working on the drop issue.
“Taking all the responsibility head on from last year with the drops,” Coleman-Williams told AL.com.
He also mentioning becoming a better overall receiver, improving his blocking in the run game, downfield and more. But he highlighted drops first for a reason. They plagued him throughout his sophomore campaign. Coleman-Williams tallied 10 in 2026, per PFF. That led all Power Four receivers. And those are on plays in which defenders didn’t make plays on the ball.
Minimize drops as much as possible in 2026, and Coleman-Williams can return to the top of the position in the SEC and perhaps even college football. He made clear during his time with AL.com that he’s making a point to fix them.
“It’s more than your hands alone,” Coleman-Williams said. “It’s a lot mental. Just having that confidence that I’m capable of. I’ve been doing it my entire life. Doing more JUGS. You can never catch too many JUGS.”
I’ll let y’all take that last sentence from here.
Paul Finebaum revealed that Kalen’s seat was scorching hot after last season’s opener.
During one of the SEC Media Days, Finebaum sat down with That SEC Podcast and dropped a tidbit about just how close Kalen DeBoer came to the edge. While recounting a trip to Tuscaloosa for the Tennessee game, Finebaum ran into a high-rolling Alabama booster early in the morning at the Capstone Hotel. That conversation exposed the sheer panic happening among the boosters, as they considered showing DeBoer the door.
“I ran into some fat cat at the hotel really early. We get out early because the show starts at 9, I think,” Paul Finebaum said. “I didn’t know him, but he was a major booster staying at the Capstone Hotel in Tuscaloosa. He said, ‘You know, things were pretty grim after the Florida State loss!’ I said, ‘Really?’ He said, ‘Yeah. There were calls being made,’ this is Day 1 of the season-Sunday morning. On Sunday morning, calls were being made like, ‘What’s it going to take, if this doesn’t turn around for us, to buy DeBoer out?’”
That’s actually fair. If 2025 FSU had turned into 2000 UCLA, DeBoer justifiably wouldn’t be here right now. To his and the team’s credit, they did in fact turn it around.
Paul also revealed that his ESPN tenure nearly ended before it started.
“President of South Carolina complains about me, and [Mike] Slive doesn’t have any idea,” Finebaum said on That SEC Podcast on July 26. “He said, “What? That’s outrageous.” So, Slive just calls me and starts chewing me out. You can’t explain your way out of that. You can’t blame it all on Steve Spurrier, who called his own player a joke. But anyway, that was something. “I mean, the network had not started yet, and they were thinking about firing me.”
The story was just months after the ESPN broadcaster’s hiring by the network. Before the season started in August, ESPN asked him to move to Charlotte to host a radio show for ESPN. Finebaum was doing a number of shows, and in one of those appearances, he called out South Carolina player Jadeveon Clowney as the biggest joke in college football. He heavily pushed the narrative that Clowney was being “lazy” and was protected by hype for missing practices. The situation took a nasty turn for Finebaum.
Oh, what might have been.
Of course Stanford is the school that would form the first CFBPA chapter.
According to the CFBPA website, the organization seeks to “educate, organize and advocate” on behalf of college football players and eventually hopes to “provide the firm foundation for unionization and collective bargaining.” The Stanford chapter is calling on college football players around the country to form their own CFBPA chapters.
“Stanford has been a pioneer and an innovator not just in football but as a school in general,” Cooper said. “The first-ever current player-led chapter at Stanford is just another example of this innovation. We want to be the leaders in college football and show other schools they can create a chapter on their campus because we believe this is the future of college football.”
It will never not be weird to call Stanford a ACC school.
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Last, Bill Connelly managed to survive the ESPN cuts, and he put out a longform highlighting 100 games that got college football to where it is today. Realignment is mentioned heavily, but we particularly enjoy this one around these parts.
38-39. Nov. 18, 2011: Iowa State 37, No. 2 Oklahoma State 31; Jan. 9, 2012: No. 2 Alabama 21, No. 1 LSU 0. The two games that broke the camel’s back. The drumbeat for a playoff had already grown deafening by 2011, but when Iowa State upset unbeaten Oklahoma State late in the season — thanks in part to a field goal Oklahoma State missed by a millimeter, if at all — Alabama ended up landing the No. 2 spot and getting a rematch against unbeaten LSU after a classic 9-6 Tigers win in November. The title game was a 60-minute sleeper hold in the Tide’s favor, and the poor TV ratings that resulted from it convinced the final holdouts that a four-team playoff was a pretty good idea.
Nick Saban was just too damn dominant.
That’s about it for now. Have a great week.
Roll Tide.
