Season over, hearts broken, the Alabama Crimson Tide football team flew home from California on Jan. 2.
Not long after arriving at his house in Tuscaloosa, quarterback Jalen Milroe took out his phone and texted two words to his offensive coordinator, Tommy Rees.
Thank you.
The day before, Milroe had ended the 2023 season with the ball in his hands. He also ended it on the ground, short of the Rose Bowl end zone, with Michigan players dashing off in celebration of their berth in the College Football Playoff title game and Alabama players absorbing the crushing weight of sudden defeat.
Back home, Milroe sifted through what had happened at the end of the 27–20 overtime loss. The Tide faced a fourth-and-goal from the 3-yard line, needing a touchdown to extend the game. The Wolverines surveyed Bama’s offensive formation and called a timeout. Then Alabama called one, extending the chess match. Rees made the final play call.
“O.K., bet,” Milroe said to himself at the time. “Let’s roll.”
But the snap from center Seth McLaughlin was low—a recurring issue in the game and throughout the season—with Milroe reaching down to snatch it at shoe-top height.
The timing of the play, a power run to the left behind pulling guard Jaeden Roberts, was scuttled at that point. Milroe’s hasty charge straight up the middle was stopped a full two yards short of the end zone.
“It hurt,” Milroe says. “But one thing I took away that was bigger than the moment was appreciation, because we could have thrown the ball, handed the ball off, somebody else could have had the ball. So that means they truly had confidence in me and believed in me in the last play of the game, which was for our season.”
That’s why Milroe sent the text to Rees. Putting the ball in his hands with everything on the line was the final confirmation of his standing in Alabama football lore—a hallowed place that he patiently had worked for.
The Wolverines went on to authoritatively win the national championship one week later, while the Tide were left to ponder the title that eluded them. Then and now, Milroe refuses to blame the snap, the blocking or the play call itself, which was heavily second-guessed at the time.
“Great call,” he says. “Just didn’t do the right things on the play.”
Milroe and his two siblings grew up in a military household. His father, Quentin, was a U.S. Marine Corps combat veteran who served in Iraq as an infantryman. His mother, Lola, was in the Navy. Accountability was a household tenet. Accordingly, he voluntarily carries the responsibility for the run that ended the Nick Saban era at Alabama. Milroe is semper fi to the Crimson Tide.
Just about everything changed in Tuscaloosa after that play. Nine days later, Saban abruptly retired—a foreseeable event but shocking in the moment—triggering a national domino effect of player and coach movement. After the now-customary December tumult of transfers and staff changes, here came another seismic shift in mid-January. For once, Alabama was not immune to it.
The Tide’s leading tackler (Caleb Downs) and five-star quarterback signee (Julian Sayin) departed for Ohio State. Their leader in receptions (Isaiah Bond) and top tight end (Amari Niblack) left for Texas. Key defensive backs also relocated to SEC competitors Mississippi and Kentucky. One thing that didn’t change: Milroe’s allegiance to Alabama.
He could have had abundant transfer options. The strong, fast signal-caller from Katy, Texas, is the leading returning vote-getter from the 2023 Heisman Trophy race after racking up 35 total touchdowns and finishing second in the SEC in pass efficiency. (He finished sixth in that Heisman vote.) He led a flawed Alabama team to a 12–2 record, an SEC championship and within two yards of playing for yet another national title.
In a market ravenous for proven quarterbacks, transfer suitors were dangling “high seven figures” in front of Milroe, according to one source familiar with what was being offered. The Tide clearly aren’t lacking resources to pay their players, and Milroe is being well-compensated. But he’s also a bit of an old soul in the current landscape of free agent college football.
Put simply, Milroe preferred to finish what he started, where he started it. He chose Alabama in part to become a member of an NFL-level quarterback legacy, following Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones and Bryce Young. He wasn’t going to give up on that easily.
Milroe spent two years backing up Young without looking elsewhere. He endured a surprise benching after a lackluster performance in an early loss to Texas last fall—which nearly backfired on the Tide in a 17–3 slog over South Florida with him on the sidelines—without public complaint. Then he fulfilled a promise to his parents by graduating cum laude in December with a degree in business administration.
“I told them before I got to college, ‘I’m going to get my degree from the University of Alabama,’ ” Milroe says. “Nothing was going to distract me from that.”
Yet at what could have been a natural separation point, Milroe continued to stick around. He made a savvy read of the NFL landscape—the first round of the 2024 draft was loaded with QBs and he’d started just 14 college games, so a fourth season was the right move. And now, while working on a master’s degree in hospitality management, Milroe can carve out his place in Tide lore as the bridge between the Saban and Kalen DeBoer eras.
“He’s not going to be knocked off what he sets his mind to,” Quentin Milroe says. “When he’s committed to something, he’s not just going to pull away when things get hard.”
Things were hard earlier this year. In addition to the transfers out, there was a brief period where DeBoer’s offensive coordinator at Washington, Ryan Grubb, was in place at Alabama. Then Grubb was hired away by the Seahawks and replaced by another former Huskies staffer, Nick Sheridan.
“Jalen’s been really receptive to everything we’ve brought forward, and he’s an open book just wanting to take it all in,” DeBoer says. “He and Nick have really grown a great relationship. He’s been in that mindset where getting new information and adding to what he’s already learned under other coaches is helping him become what he can be.”
DeBoer and Sheridan had a powerful selling point: They’d coached Heisman runner-up Michael Penix Jr. at Indiana and Washington—unveiling Penix’s potential at the first stop and then rebuilding him at the second after injuries and a confidence crisis. That coach-quarterback combination produced the best seasons in the last 30 years—at least—for both the Hoosiers and the Huskies.
On his way to becoming a top-10 draft pick, Penix was the launching pad for a dazzling vertical passing game the past two seasons at Washington. What quarterback wouldn’t want to plug into that scheme? With a howitzer for an arm and DeBoer’s offense—which is buttressed by the arrival of former Huskies wideout Germie Bernard—Milroe could be the next deep-shot king of the college game.
“I didn’t want to make an emotional decision early on in that situation,” Milroe says of the stay-or-go deliberations.
“I think the biggest thing was to allow things to fall into place. Everything is scattered in a sense. I use that analogy of puzzle pieces. You pour everything on the table and you are like, ‘Man, how are you going to figure this out?’ But then when you put all the pieces together and out comes the final product, you’re like, ‘Wow, what a great story.’ ”
Around the same time the puzzle pieces were coming together, ESPN men’s basketball analyst Jay Williams came to Tuscaloosa to call the Auburn-Alabama game on Jan. 24. The start to the game was plagued by power outages that resulted in a lengthy delay. Desperate to fill dead air, ESPN brought Milroe down from the stands to sit between Williams and play-by-play man Karl Ravech for 10 minutes.
“I was blown away,” Williams says. “There was something special about this guy.”
That interaction started a relationship between the two that has grown into a business collaboration. Williams is chairman of Improbable Media, a company he cofounded in 2023 with NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo to “empower athletes to be the driving force in their own narrative.” In July, the company introduced Milroe as their first athlete partner.
“Everything he stands for is what I would like the representation of the modern student-athlete to be,” Williams says. “Jalen allows us to have a footprint in the college space. He’s carrying the weight of continuing the standard of excellence for one of the biggest brands in college sports as it’s going through a reorg, for lack of a better term.”
From a business perspective, Milroe already was in the game. He established a catchphrase–turned–clothing line with teammate Terrion Arnold: LANK, which stands for “Let All Naysayers Know.” Shoppers can buy LANK merchandise from $4.99 (for a sticker) to $79.99 (a shersey).
This was another reason to stay in Tuscaloosa; Milroe notes that “the resources that come with the script A” will help him in business today and in life after football. But for Milroe, building his personal brand will take a backseat this fall to honing his quarterback craft. He can make the big plays, as evidenced by his 21 touchdowns of 20-plus yards last season, either passing or running. The most celebrated of those, of course, was the fourth-and-31 javelin throw to Bond in the corner of the end zone to win the Iron Bowl over Auburn, a stunning play that saved the season amid a cauldron of pressure in Jordan-Hare Stadium. (“I didn’t hear anything really,” Milroe says. “I was numb when I threw the ball.”)
That escape fed into the SEC title game triumph over Georgia, an upset in which Milroe played every bit as well as the Bulldogs’ Carson Beck, who is considered the top quarterback prospect for the 2025 draft. The then-two-time defending national champion Bulldogs put the Tide in the rare position of being an underdog with nothing to lose. “We had a group of guys that was starving,” Milroe says. “We played as one group and it was shared success.”
Milroe is working to polish his passing skills and defensive reads, relying less on his elite athleticism to make plays and acknowledging the occasional need for checkdown plays to keep drives alive.
“I think he’s continued to expand on his game with the different throws he can make,” DeBoer says. “A year ago, he was one of the best in the country with down-the-field throws. He’s continued to work on those higher percentage throws that you need to move the chains.”
To make strides in those areas, Milroe maximized his time with the first family of quarterbacking as a counselor at the Manning Passing Academy in June in Thibodaux, La. Not only did he soak up lessons from Peyton, Eli and Archie, but Milroe says he also spent about 30 minutes on the field talking with a prominent camp visitor—Bill Belichick. The legendary former Patriots coach is close with Saban and the two have similar defensive views of the game. Milroe’s big takeaways from those conversations?
“Just be a student of the game in a sense,” he says. “I can throw the ball. If you’re a starting quarterback in college football, you can throw the ball. What’s going to separate you is mastering the game of football, knowing what everyone’s doing on offense, mastering what defenses are doing, the different techniques up front, why the corner has outside leverage, little things like that.”
As for the other parts of the job, Milroe has the leadership and work ethic down. This is essentially what he’s spent his whole life doing. He’s been a quarterback from peewee football on, operating under the Milroe family ethos that Quentin describes thusly: “Show them what right looks like.”
What it looks like these days is Milroe arriving at the Alabama football facility before dawn. DeBoer says Milroe is there by 5 a.m. daily. “I know there’s guys that have tried to beat him into the facility, and they can’t,” DeBoer says.
Having earned his teammates’ respect, Milroe hasn’t been afraid to stand up and demand more from them. DeBoer mentions a summer day when the quarterback got up in front of the team and delivered a message the coach describes as “positive but also [demanding] accountability, that mix of everything that great leaders do. Building up their teammates but also just reminding them of what it’s going to take for us to reach the goals that we have.”
Jalen Milroe will play the biggest role of any player in setting Alabama’s course in Year 1 after the GOAT. The ball is in his hands, literally and figuratively. It’s all he’s ever asked for.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Jalen Milroe Is Back in the Spotlight Ushering in the Kalen DeBoer Era at Alabama.
