Mario didn’t take over a juggernaut like Coker or Erickson did. Or like DeBoer did.
He had an image that he wanted his program rebuilt into (something akin to Alabama or Miami or old). And he set about doing that, in a process that was multi year.
DeBoer inherited a team that has absolutely dominated high school recruiting over the last 15 years, and whose only real competition for talent was Ohio State and Georgia. Alabama was like the Miami teams of old…every year a national championship was expected, and reasonably so because of the absurd level of talent. And now they’ve slid back.
A secondary problem that not many are talking about is how well equipped is Alabama to exist in a transfer portal / NIL ecosystem. They dominated pre NIL when the top payments were $300K. Now you have players earning nine figures. Now you can’t simply stack talent, because talent can leave. Those are factors that DeBoer now faces, and Saban would have faced if he had not retired.