Kalen DeBoer coaching history: Career record, contract, more for Alabama football coach (2024)

For years, there was something of a guessing game in college football circles rooted around a single, all-important question.

Whenever Nick Saban decided to hang up his whistle and end his legendary tenure at Alabama, who would replace him?

The head coach of the Crimson Tide is a job unlike any in college sports, precisely because whoever inhabits the role has to be more than just a coach. They have to not just win, but do so at a level that aligns with the program’s proud history and meets the justifiably high expectations of its fan base. The Tide can’t just be a conference title contender, but a regular national championship threat. With that comes a significant amount of pressure that makes the position more like a head of state than a coach.

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All of this is to say that it takes more than just an impressive resume to lead Alabama. It takes a special kind of person and coach to ably follow in the footsteps of Saban and Bear Bryant.

In Kalen DeBoer, the Tide hope it has just that.

Within days of Saban retiring in January — 49 hours, to be exact — Alabama athletic director Greg Byrne turned to DeBoer as Saban’s long-awaited and much-speculated successor, marking the end of an intense, accelerated search that at various points was tied to names like Texas' Steve Sarkisian, Oregon's Dan Lanning and Florida State's Mike Norvell.

Kalen DeBoer coaching career

DeBoer’s rise up the FBS head-coaching ranks has been rapid. If the aforementioned guessing game about Saban’s replacement were taking place in 2021, for example, few people would have believed the ultimately correct answer would have been the Fresno State coach.

The road that led him to Tuscaloosa, though, was long.

After graduating from Sioux Falls, where he was a record-setting receiver who helped lead the school to an NAIA championship in 1996, DeBoer worked as an assistant coach at a South Dakota high school while playing semipro football and independent league baseball.

In 2000, he began as the offensive coordinator at Sioux Falls and five years later was promoted to head coach. For all the success he brought to his alma mater as a player, he did even more as a coach, leading Sioux Falls to three NAIA championships in his five seasons at the helm. In his final four seasons, the Cougars went 56-1.

From there, he jumped to the FCS ranks, where he worked for four seasons as Southern Illinois’ offensive coordinator, before making the move to the FBS in 2014 at Eastern Michigan, where he would spend three seasons. In 2017, he became Fresno State’s offensive coordinator and helped the Bulldogs average 34.6 points per game in his second season there, nearly double the 17.7 points per game they averaged before he took over.

After one season as the offensive coordinator at Indiana, where he helped the Hoosiers match their highest win total in 26 years, he returned to Fresno State, this time as the head coach. In two seasons, one of which was shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic, his teams went 12-6, including a 9-3 mark in his second and final season.

That improvement earned him the job at Washington, where he was tasked with turning around a program that had cratered during the 2021 season and finished 4-8.

Once in Seattle, he engineered one of the most dramatic turnarounds in recent college football history. Led by transfer quarterback Michael Penix Jr., who played for DeBoer during his one season at Indiana, the Huskies went 11-2, nearly tripling their win total from the previous season. The change in record only told so much of the story. After ranking 107th in the FBS in scoring offense in 2021 (21.5 points per game), Washington vaulted all the way up to seventh in its first season under DeBoer, averaging 39.7 points per game.

In 2023, he built on that successful foundation. The Huskies had an undefeated regular season, won the final Pac-12 championship, earned their first-ever victory in the College Football Playoff and finished the season with a school-record 14 wins. In the process, DeBoer won multiple national coach of the year awards and became the first Washington coach ever to win at least 11 games in consecutive seasons.

Here’s a look at DeBoer’s coaching journey:

1997: Sioux Falls (WRs)
1998-99: Washington (South Dakota) High School (assistant coach)
2000-04: Sioux Falls (OC)
2005-09: Sioux Falls
2010-13: Southern Illinois (OC/WRs)
2014-16: Eastern Michigan (OC/QBs)
2017-18: Fresno State (OC/QBs)
2019: Indiana (OC/QBs)
2020-21: Fresno State
2022-23: Washington
2024-present: Alabama

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Kalen DeBoer record

Across nine seasons as a head coach, DeBoer has an overall record of 104-12, which includes a 74-8 mark in conference play.

Heading into his first season at Alabama, DeBoer has a 12-2 record against top-25 opponents in four seasons as an FBS head coach. In his nine seasons as a head coach, he has a 24-6 record in one-score games.

Here’s a look at DeBoer’s coaching record at each of his previous head-coaching positions:

Sioux Falls: 67-3 (49-1 Great Plains Athletic Conference)
Fresno State: 12-6 overall (9-5 Mountain West)
Washington: 25-3 overall (16-2 Pac-12)

Kalen DeBoer contract

DeBoer signed an eight-year contract with Alabama that is set up to pay him $87 million.

He’ll make $10 million in his first season, a sum that will gradually escalate to $11.75 million by the end of the deal. For 2024, he’s tied with Norvell as the fourth highest-paid coach in college football. The $10 million he’ll earn in his first season is a significant pay bump from the $4.2 million in total pay he picked up in his final season at Washington, which had offered him a new deal after the Huskies’ Sugar Bowl victory against Texas that would have paid him $9.4 million.

Kalen DeBoer age

DeBoer is 49 years old and will turn 50 on Oct. 24, two days before his team hosts preseason No. 11 Missouri.