Washington head coach Kalen DeBoer ‘is negotiating a contract to take over the Alabama Crimson Tide from the retiring Nick Saban’

Alabama has selected a new head football coach in Kalen DeBoer — in what is a stunning rise through the bowels of college football to the most elite program in sports.

DeBoer recently led the University of Washington Huskies to a national championship berth, an undefeated regular season and the last Pac-12 title in history.

But according to ESPN’s Mark Schlabach and Chris LowDeBoer is Alabama’s choice to replace the retiring Nick Saban – with the Huskies coach in contract negotiations for the job.

The 49-year-old DeBoer had just two seasons in charge in Seattle, going 25-3 with the Huskies and winning both the Alamo Bowl and Sugar Bowl.

Washington finished the season ranked second in the country with a 14–1 record – Michigan’s only loss in the CFP National Championship Game.

It’s a job that carries the most pressure and expectations of any other job in college football, with the atmosphere in Tuscaloosa demanding championships every season.

That wasn’t the case in the past. When Saban took over, Alabama was perhaps at a low point.

Since then, Saban has won six national titles and returned the program to national relevance while cementing himself as perhaps college football’s greatest leader ever.

Now that job falls to a 49-year-old whose first head coaching job was at the University of Sioux Falls in South Dakota — a school that doesn’t even compete in the NCAA, but rather the National Association of Intercollegiate Athletics, or NAIA. .

Sioux Falls is where DeBoer played his college football before immediately becoming a wide receiver coach after graduating.

After two seasons of coaching in high school, he returned to Sioux Falls as their offensive coordinator before taking over as head coach from 2005-2009.

There he reached five consecutive NAIA national championship games, winning three of them.

Between 2010 and 2019, DeBoer was the offensive coordinator at four different programs: Southern Illinois (2010-2013), Eastern Michigan (2014-2016), Fresno State (2017-2018) and Indiana (2019).

DeBoer was hired by Washington in 2021 after going 9-3 against Fresno State the season before

After that one year at Indiana, DeBoer took his first head coaching job at the NCAA level, returning to Fresno State.

DeBoer went 3-3 with the Bulldogs in the Covid year of 2020, but promptly rebounded in 2021, going 9-3 to win the New Mexico Bowl over UTEP.

In 2021, the University of Washington fired their head coach – current Los Angeles Rams assistant head coach Jimmy Lake – and replaced him with DeBoer.

THIS IS A DEVELOPMENT STORY. MORE TO FOLLOW.