Can Kalen DeBoer solve Alabama Football’s recent road woes?

New Alabama Football coach Kalen DeBoer has an early chance to endear himself to the Crimson Tide’s fanbase. If Alabama can go out and dominate Wisconsin at Camp Randall Stadium on Saturday afternoon, it will buck a recent trend of road woes that has plagued the Tide the last few years and give Tide fans even more reason to be confident that DeBoer is the right successor for Nick Saban.

During the peak of Saban’s dominant run in Tuscaloosa, it didn’t seem to matter who Alabama played or where they played. There was typically a game here or there that would be closer than it should’ve, and there were a handful of upset losses thrown in the mix, but for the most part against teams Alabama should handle, they handled. Anybody, anytime, anywhere.

Damion Square once famously said in the locker room years ago, “we runnin’ in they house, we blowing that ***** up, and we going home.” And that’s what the Crimson Tide did time and time again.

Whether it was a four-touchdown win over No. 8 Georgia in 2015, a 39-point win over No. 9 Tennessee in 2016, a 29-0 shellacking of No. 3 LSU in 2018, or the dominance of every opponent the 2020 team faced, Alabama seemed impervious to the road struggles that typically plague college football teams across the country.

Road games are notoriously difficult. So, it’s not a flaw in Alabama that they’ve looked like everyone else on the road over the last three seasons, but it was an obvious chink in the armour of the Saban machine that had begun to leak a little bit of oil.

Alabama narrowly avoided an upset to an eventual 6-7 Florida team in the Swamp in 2021. It took stopping a two-point conversion with 3-minutes left on the clock for Saban’s team to escape unscathed. A few weeks later the team dropped a road game to an 8-win Texas A&M. 6-win Auburn gave Alabama all it could handle in the Iron Bowl at Jordan-Hare, with the Tide narrowly escaping with a win in four overtimes.

2022 was more of the same. 8-win Texas nearly pulled a week two upset in Austin, with Will Reichard hitting a game winning field goal for a 20-19 win. Alabama lost on a game winning field goal a few weeks later at Tennessee, snapping a 15-game winning streak in the Third Saturday in October rivalry. That loss prompted the infamous Will Anderson quote about anxiety that sent the fanbase into a frenzy. Alabama’s next road game was an overtime loss at LSU.

Alabama went unbeaten on the road last season, but they had a forgettable performance against South Florida, a close win over Texas A&M, and then needed a miracle in the Iron Bowl.

From 2011-2020, Alabama was a ridiculous 38-4 in 42 true road games, good for a winning percentage of 90%. Since 2021, the Crimson Tide is 11-3 on the road, a 79% winning percentage. Winning 79% of your true road games is an impressive feat, particularly in the SEC in some of the most raucous environments in college football. But it is telling that over a 10-year span Alabama lost only one more road game than they have in the past three seasons.

Camp Randall Stadium is widely considered one of the toughest places to play in college football. EA Sports ranked it 7th on the toughest places to play list for the new CFB25 video game. But, Madison hasn’t exactly been a house of horrors for ranked non-conference opponents.

Per Jesse Temple with the Athletic, Wisconsin is 1-9 against Top-10 ranked opponents at home in program history. Their lone win came way back in 1974 and the Badgers haven’t even faced a Top-10 non-conference opponent at Camp Randall since a blowout loss to Miami in 2001. If you move beyond the Top-10 and just count ranked opponents, the numbers aren’t much friendlier: Wisconsin is 3-19-1 all time at home against ranked non-conference opponents.

Wisconsin is 2-0 to start the season, but it’s a shaky 2-0. They won by 14-points each against overmatched opponents in Western Michigan and South Dakota in the first two weeks. So while this environment won’t be easy, Alabama should be able to win and win comfortably, if they are to be taken seriously as contenders.

More difficult road tests await the Tide, with trips coming to Knoxville, Baton Rouge, and Norman on the docket. This Saturday, we’ll get a good gauge of how Alabama might fare moving forward away from home, and if Kalen DeBoer has immediately reduced the anxiety that bothered the last few Saban teams.