Alabama Badly Lost Its Home State This Cycle - And Might Be Losing The South
Alabama had its worst in-state class in Kalen DeBoer's first season at the helm, and it could be a canary in the coal mine for their chances in Dixie.
Alabama has one of the best 2025 recruiting classes in the nation. According to On3 they rank #3, 247Sports has them at #2, and my rankings have them the lowest at #4. Their 22 commitments are undeniably talented and almost certainly contain at least a handful of future NFL players. Despite their overall success, they failed to get in-state talent when compared to their main rivals Auburn. This appears to be partially due to a randomly disadvantageous distribution of talent for the Crimson Tide in the 2025 class and that they did a worse job at convincing in-state talent to stay home than the Tigers. This seems to just be a smaller symptom of the larger problem that Alabama struggled to recruit the south overall this cycle.
Before we go into diagnosing Bama’s problems and their results we have to establish that a problem existed in the first place. We’ll begin by looking at the Yellowhammer state high school athletes who received 10+ offers from Power 4 programs and were offered by both Auburn and Alabama. This group of athletes which received 10+ offers we’ll call “competitive recruits.” They received an above average amount of offers, and thus were almost certainly being seriously pursued by multiple major football programs. We only care about if they were offered by both Auburn and Alabama at this moment because it can give us some indication as to who did a better job at recruiting the competitive in-state recruits when both were involved.
Auburn won. Auburn won and it’s not even kind of close. There were 14 competitive in-state recruits which had offers from both, and Auburn won half of them. Furthermore, Alabama only managed to grab two of the three lowest rated recruits, both of which are abundant interior offensive linemen. There are many ways to try and measure how much a given program “puts up a fence” around a metro or state but locking your biggest rival out of any of the top 10 in-state recruits absolutely counts. But when is the last time Auburn won the state?
Really, we want to see if Alabama “put up a fence” around its home state in the past. If Alabama did put up a fence, then most of the best in-state recruits consistently committed to the Crimson Tide when the Tide wanted them. That means we want to see if Alabama met three conditions:
A plurality of the in-state talent committed to Alabama
A significant proportion of in-state recruits with an Alabama offer ended up committing
Alabama got a significant amount of in-state recruits
We can measure these conditions! It will be useful to only consider competitive recruits as we defined them earlier. This way we will not give either program extra credit for filling out the bottom portion of their recruiting classes with glorified in-state PWOs. We will measure each with the following metrics:
Competitive Talent Share: The proportion of the total recruiting rating which committed to Alabama.
(Total Rating of Alabama Commits) / (Total Rating of AL Recruits)
Commitment Rate: The proportion of players with a Alabama offer which committed to Alabama.
(# of Alabama Commits) / (# of Recruits with Alabama Offers)
Total Commits: The number of players committed to Alabama
So now that we have some tools to measure how well Alabama put up a fence around the state, how well have they done in the past compared to this cycle?
Looking back to 2021, the final class recruited without the guarantee of NIL money, Alabama had consistently won the state regardless of measure. Auburn quickly changed its fortunes in 2024 and became extremely competitive in-state likely due to some combination of new energy from Hugh Freeze and Nick Saban suddenly retiring in January. But 2025 marks a significant turning point within the rivalry where Auburn unequivocally trounced Alabama for the first time in at least 5 classes. Since we have strongly established this is significant movement, why do we think this happened? We’ll start with a geographic analysis first.
There are 6 metropolitan areas in Alabama: Birmingham, Huntsville, Montgomery, Mobile, and Tuscaloosa with Russell county as a suburb to Columbus, GA. For the purposes of high school recruiting, we are chiefly concerned with the area around state capital Birmingham in the center of the state and the area around Mobile in the southernmost point of the state. Historically, Alabama has always recruited its state well, but they tend to do the best in Birmingham since they’re only 50 miles apart. Mobile has been more of a battleground which Alabama won more often under Saban. This makes it a bit tougher road for the Crimson Tide in cycles such as 2025 with down Birmingham years.
2025 was the worst year for Birmingham since over the last 5 recruiting cycles at the same time when the Crimson Tide’s home city Tuscaloosa didn’t produce a single competitive recruit. Furthermore, there were more competitive recruits out of rural Alabama than any other individual metro. 4 of those 7 recruits even came from the Wiregrass region in the southeastern portion of the state closer to Auburn. Given that there were fewer recruits in areas advantageous to the Crimson Tide, it would be safe to say that Alabama had as much of an uphill battle as that program can have in-state.
It would have been reasonable to expect Alabama to take a bit of a step back in-state with a new coaching staff which has spent most of their career outside of the southeast. Especially when they’re going up against recruiting aficionado and Dixie native Hugh Freeze over at Auburn. Doubly so when the first class happens to coincide with a down year in Birmingham and an up year in the Wiregrass region. Those probably match up to the two of the larger factors behind their in-state struggles: bad geographic luck and getting straight-up out gunned by a coaching staff more familiar with the area. The single biggest factor, however, seems to be a bet by DeBoer’s staff that they can put together competitive rosters while ignoring the deep south.
In the class of 2025, Alabama had as many recruits come from California (7) as they did from the deep south (7). They signed more players from the suburbs of Philadelphia (2) and the DFW metroplex (2) than they did from anywhere inside of the Atlanta metropolitan area (1). They have more Canadians than recruits from Louisiana. They did not sign a single player from Miami, Charlotte, or Nashville. It is safe to say that the dearth of players from the south is an unusual composition for the recruiting class of an SEC power.
There’s two possibilities for how this class with a dearth of southern talent came to be:
Kalen DeBoer’s staff made a conscious bet that it would be more efficient to try and get talent from everywhere across the country than focusing on the south
Their fellow SEC (and Floridian) powers have done such a better job at locking down their own backyards that Alabama got locked out of the southern talent, and thus had to pivot
Both almost certainly played a factor to some extent, and frankly it doesn’t really matter if Alabama continues to get boxed out of the south if they can keep building talented classes. It just becomes contingent on the Crimson Tide continue to attract 10+ blue chips who grew up thousands of miles away without the powers of Nick Saban guaranteeing 11+ win seasons. If you don’t think that is a good bet, fixing it starts with focusing on getting the easier to grab talent down south.
If you enjoyed this post, please subscribe so that you can receive emails updating you upon every post and share this with others who you think might enjoy. This is a free newsletter, but if you are feeling so generous you can buy me a coffee.
Since the 2025 class has pretty much run its course and we have a few months before the 2026 class really picks up (and the holidays lol) I will probably be going for some less frequent but more in-depth pieces like this for given classes/regions/sporadic NFL topics that catch my eye. If you have anything you’d like to see me discuss in particular, feel free to drop a comment, DM me, or send a message in the TEP chat. Thanks! - CRM
This was a very interesting read, great job. Reminds me of UGA’s 2023 class (the first cycle where the staff had a national championship under their belts).
The in-state performance was abysmal, in part due to other schools stealing their lunch money, but also because the class was a down year instate.
It’s always interesting to consider where exactly a lot of these prospects are on the boards of these staffs. A lot of times in Georgia, there are kids who are highly rated and have a UGA offer, but who the staff are not prioritizing.
I agree with your conclusion that ideally I’m sure Bama’s staff would have liked to secure more prospects in-state (a few of them were committed before flipping to Auburn or elsewhere), but they also might not have been as impressed with the instate players this cycle. Will be interesting to see if it’s a trend, or just a momentary blip.