I think he will do alright. He won't produce what Nick did but no one is / was going to do that. Not for many, many years at any place.
I believe he can win 10 games and get to the playoff this year that will generate excitement and help him in recruiting. That depends on how well the staff is at recruiting because if you have a staff that can't recruit at a high level, it eventually catches up with you. But he should keep Alabama competitive.
With Texas and Oklahoma coming in, competing for a championship in the SEC is going to be extremely hard. Even Georgia with all their exceptional talent is not going to waltz to the championship every year. Each year going forward is going to be harder to win the SEC. Multiple teams likely can get to the playoffs but I predict that we will also see some 10 win teams not make the playoff. Had the 12 team playoff been in place this year, Oklahoma would have been left out. You also had 5 other teams with 9 wins all of which could have easily gotten to 10 and been left out. So winning the SEC going forward not going to be easy.
Comparing Alabama to Tennessee as things sit right at this moment, Alabama still has 56 four and five star players on their roster. Now they lost a lot of starters to portal or NFL so they will be young and lacking experience wise (so will UT in several position groups) but very talented. Comparing that to Tennessee, we will have 35 four and five stars on our roster. So you can tell, we still lag behind them from a talent standpoint.
The other factor is how well He can coach in this conference and will that be successful here. That is a TBD. Based on what I've seen of him, I think he can coach in this league. Recruiting is where he will eventually succeed or fail. He will NEVER satisfy a lot of Alabama fans. But that is no different than many UT fans that complain about Heuple with every loss. But he can succeed. After all, we think our South Dakota native will succeed so why can't another one.
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