Rece Davis evaluates Alabama's improvement halfway through the regular season

The expectations don’t get much higher in the college football landscape than they are for Alabama, who did not meet those expectations to start the season.

Their double-digit loss to Texas and a surprisingly close game versus USF had many questioning the Crimson Tide, but they are now in the driver’s seat of the SEC West division following a 26-20 win over Texas A&M this weekend.

ESPN’s Rece Davis joined ‘The Paul Finebaum Show’ and discussed Alabama’s improvement this season, a relatively new task for the Crimson Tide.

“It occurred to me Paul that really since 2008, certainly since 2009, that Alabama has entered virtually every season as close to a finished product,” Davis said. “Now there’s tweaking, and there’s honing, and there’s compensating for injuries, but the ceiling is not very far away from where Alabama starts typically.”

Nick Saban‘s teams are notoriously ready to go to start college football seasons, but this season Davis believes they resemble a team from the past that steadily improved throughout their respective football season and still achieved great heights.

“What this Alabama team appears to me to be is much more like USC in 2016, now I don’t know if they’ll get to this next level or not, but SC they lost multiple games early then Sam Darnold came in, they got it together by the end,” Davis explained. “A lot of people we’re trying to put them in the playoff because they were the hot team and they were the team, ‘Oh you don’t want to see them now they’ve improved, so much better.'”

The Trojans started off the 2016 team 1-3, which includes a blowout loss to the Crimson Tide. But after Week 4 they ran the table, capped off by a Rose Bowl win over No. 5 ranked Penn State that had many believing they were one of the best teams in the country despite their slow start.

“Alabama has room to grow and improve and still has that room to grow and improve, we’re just not used to seeing it and it appears that they’ve taken some significant steps in that direction and if they continue to do so, then maybe by late November, early December they will be that team. ‘You don’t want to deal with them now, you should’ve gotten them in September or early October,’ because they’re going to be a handful now,” Davis said.

The Crimson Tide are improving in the right areas, boasting the SEC’s second-best scoring defense and quarterback Jalen Milroe coming off a career-high 321 yards and three touchdowns versus Texas A&M. And it will definitely be intriguing to see how much more Alabama can improve and what heights they can reach following a rare slow start to the season.

“They still got room, they’ve got a lot to do. Jalen Milroe is improving and needs to continue to do so, the offensive line needs to play as well as it was talked in the early season, and they appear to be taking some strides in that direction and if so they’ve got a chance to be really good by the end,” Davis concluded.