AK Dear was mid-breakout inside Bryant-Denny on Thursday and Alabama’s run game just got served the invoice for everything it failed to be in 2025.
He scored. He had the touches. Kalen DeBoer was already talking about him in the past tense before the ice packs even hit the table. “It was unfortunate because he was having a real nice scrimmage there with the touches he got,” DeBoer said after the first fall camp scrimmage. That is coach-speak for the exact moment the depth chart starts sweating. Roughly six weeks. High-ankle/TightRope territory. Not season-ending, which matters, but the calendar does not care about your feelings. Alabama opens September 5 against East Carolina. Six weeks from mid-August lands him around the South Carolina window if everything breaks clean. September is now a committee problem.
I had Dear pegged as the juice. True freshman in 2025: 19 carries, 140 yards, 7.4 per tote, three touchdowns, a 56-yarder against ULM that made highlight packages look easy. Four-star kid out of Quitman, Mississippi who picked Alabama over Ole Miss, Auburn, Colorado, the whole carousel. At 6-1 and around 215, he was built for the leap. Last year’s Tide rushed like a team ranked 125th in the country. You do not paper over that with scheme talk and hope. You need a back who turns a crease into a funeral procession for the second level. Dear flashed that. Then the ankle said otherwise.
September Just Became a Truth Serum
Here is the part that actually keeps me up. The early slate is soft enough to survive and hard enough to expose. East Carolina at home. Kentucky on the road. Florida State in Tuscaloosa. South Carolina. Then Mississippi State and Georgia in early October. If Dear’s timeline holds near that late-September mark, Alabama has to invent a functional run game without its most explosive sophomore through the soft underbelly of the schedule, then plug him back in when the SEC actually starts swinging. That is either perfect timing or cruel timing depending on whether Daniel Hill, Kevin Riley, Trae’shawn Brown, and the rest of the room can carry actual volume without turning every second-and-seven into a prayer.
Hill led the team in rushing touchdowns a year ago. Riley is still on the roster. Five-star freshman EJ Crowell was already held out of that same scrimmage with a separate short-term issue; DeBoer said a few practices, no games. Brown has been the camp surprise. Portal piece Khalifa Keith fills a body. The scholarship count gets thinner the second Dear’s name slides to the out list. I am not screaming about a lost season. I am saying the identity question just got louder. Was Dear the featured piece or the change-of-pace weapon who made the committee honest? We were about to find out in September. Now we find out without him first.
Alabama spent the offseason talking about fixing the trenches and the run game like it was a personality makeover. DeBoer is in year two. The offensive line work was supposed to matter. Losing the back who averaged 7.4 yards a carry as a true freshman in limited snaps is not a depth-chart inconvenience. It is a referendum on whether the fix was real or just restocked.
The Return Window Is the Real Plot Twist
The non-season-ending part is the only mercy. Alabama has history with high-ankle timelines that look longer on paper than they play out, and the late bye gives them some runway if he needs an extra week. But I keep circling the Georgia date on October 10. If Dear is back and sharp by then, this becomes a midseason plot twist instead of a season-long hole. If the six weeks stretches, or if he returns tentative, the committee has to become something more than a collection of “or” options. It has to become a plan.
I watched enough of last year’s ground game to know Alabama cannot afford another year of polite mediocrity between the tackles. Dear’s injury does not doom the Tide. It just removes the easiest story they had for why this year would feel different. The kid from Quitman was supposed to be the flash. Now the flash is on the training table and the rest of the room has three weeks of camp and a soft opener to prove they can move chains without him. That is not panic. That is the job.
