Kane Wommack explains lack of spring transfer portal departures for Alabama

The spring NCAA transfer portal window opened on Wednesday, April 16, and officially closed at midnight last night. No scholarship player from Alabama elected to enter the portal.

Defensive coordinator Kane Wommack credited head coach Kalen DeBoer for the retention.

“I think Kalen does a tremendous job,” said Wommack earlier this week in an interview with WNSP 105.5 FM. “He’s very proactive, very engaging. He’s very relational with people. Certainly, he understands the business side of this game, but he also keeps the main thing, the main thing, right. We are trying to bring out the best in these young men to maximize their opportunities as individuals and our opportunities as a team, and those things go hand in hand. 

“People think you either got to go get yours, right, or you can sacrifice for the team. The truth is high tides raise all boats, right? And so for us, keeping that mindset for these players that everybody wants our – of course, they want our starters, but they want our twos and they want our threes, as well. And I think Kalen has done a really tremendous job of managing that, to getting these guys to buy into this team and how that helps them as individuals.”

Alabama addressed its tight end room via the spring transfer portal by adding two transfers – Troy’s Brody Dalton and West Virginia’s Jack Sammarco. That was arguably the thinnest group on the Crimson Tide’s spring roster, and now, it sits with seven scholarship athletes. Alabama, as a whole, is at 84 players, so there wasn’t much room to bring in transfers.

Keeping the spring roster intact, especially on the defensive side, helps Wommack and the rest of the Tide coaching staff, who are re-evaluating the roster following 15 spring practices.

“I’m looking at how are we going to build our roster?” Wommack said. “I’m looking at how many snaps do I think that this guy can play against Florida State versus midway through the season against South Carolina, right? Those are things that you’re asking yourself those questions. And so if one of the pieces you know on the chessboard move, right, I got to figure those things out.”

Not losing any players to the portal is an impressive, and nearly unheard of, feat in this day and age in college sports. But that’s exactly what Alabama did in the spring window. Its second-year head coach deserves a lot of credit for that, according to one of his top assistants.

“Coach DeBoer has done such a great job of being proactive on the front end,” Wommack said. “We’ve had numerous meetings with players and reached out to their families and representatives and all those things to kind of make sure we’re all on the same page, so that we’re not surprised by anything. And I think, to this point, we’re in a really good place.”

What a difference a year makes, right?

But Wommack was even pleased by what Alabama was able to do in the winter transfer portal window, which saw the Crimson Tide lose 23 scholarship players and add nine transfers.

“I think we navigated the transfer portal well” Wommack said. “We were able to retain a number of players via opportunities that maybe they had somewhere else or opportunities to go on to the NFL, and they felt like they wanted to stay another season. We were able to bring a couple of great players from the transfer portal in that we, what I would say, we hit on as you look to this point.”

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