Jalen Milroe remembers thinking it was just going to be like any other day at Alabama football headquarters. It was early January, and the Crimson Tide had recently lost its semifinal game in the College Football Playoff to Michigan, the eventual national champions, on a fourth and goal play where Milroe was stuffed on a quarterback run. Digesting the overtime loss, the Alabama players returned to Tuscaloosa for their standard end-of-season exit meeting. That’s when immortal head coach Nick Saban, winner of seven national championships, abruptly announced his retirement in a meeting with the team.
“We didn’t know he was going to retire,” Milroe tells me in July. “Everybody was surprised. Coaching staff, administrative staff, everybody. It was a surprise to all of us. He did it so quick, so that he couldn’t show his emotion. There were no signs of, like, Hey, I’m thinking about it. We didn’t know anything.” Experiencing a historic moment—for college football, but also, really, the entire American South—got Milroe and his teammates thinking of the what if. “You always have them thoughts like, Man, one more win. We could have…” His voice trails off, and it’s clear that he’s thinking about what it would have been like to win the natty as a sophomore, bring a 19th chip to Tuscaloosa, and send Saban out on top. “Yeah, it’s definitely something I’ll remember.”
With Saban gone, it falls to Milroe (plus new Bama coach Kalen DeBoer) to lead the Crimson Tide through the first year of the program’s post-GOAT era. You get the sense that he is ready to shoulder the challenge. The Texas-raised quarterback, now a junior, is a stout six feet two, and when we meet he wears a formfitting black shirt that shows off his impressive physique. He’s listed at 225 pounds, and if you didn’t know any better, you might think he plays safety. He wears his hair in tight braids, and has a tattoo that reads Phillippians 4:13 (“I can do all things through Christ who strengthens me”), as well as a sea of other ink across his body. On his right leg, he has a portrait of Martin Luther King Jr., just underneath a tiger. Barack Obama is tatted on his left thigh. Right below the knee, Heath Ledger’s Joker is wearing Milroe’s jersey. It’s clear that he’s inspired by greatness, even if it took a while for the football powers that be to see greatness in him.
He wasn’t necessarily regarded as a can’t-miss prospect coming out of high school—scouting websites had him ranked as the 14th quarterback in a recruiting class that included Caleb Williams, Drake Maye, and J.J. McCarthy, all top picks in the 2024 draft—and Milroe had to wait his turn to be Bama’s starter. Sitting behind Bryce Young, an eventual Heisman winner and first overall draft pick, was an exercise in patience. But after Young left for the pros in 2023, Milroe seized the reins. After a shaky start (and one game spent as the second-string QB), he closed the season on an eight-game heater. It wasn’t just what he was doing, though—it was how he was doing it. A sublime second half to erase a 13-point deficit against Tennessee. Four rushing touchdowns to dispel LSU. Then, in the last week of November, in a rivalry game so passionate that an Alabama fan once went to jail for poisoning Auburn’s campus, Milroe turned in the play that will lead off every one of his college highlight reels from now until eternity.
Down by four points, on the road, in the most hostile of environments, a calamity of errors put Alabama in a fourth-and-goal situation from the 31-yard line. The Crimson Tide’s playoff hopes rested on a touchdown, and Milroe was going to have to work some magic. When he caught the snap, Auburn only sent two pass rushers, leaving eight guys in coverage and one man spying him near the line of scrimmage. Milroe drifted back a few yards, surveyed the scene, and threw the pass of his life. Receiver Isaiah Bond hauled it in at the back pylon to seal an improbable victory.
