Paul Finebaum unloaded Monday morning on the recent wave of reports linking Alabama head coach Kalen DeBoer to the Penn State opening. Appearing on McElroy and Cubelic in the Morning, the SEC Network analyst torched what he called baseless speculation connecting DeBoer to the Nittany Lions job.
“I know this would be a good time for me to get on a soapbox and give a manifesto on the absolute pathetic state of sports reporting and journalism, but I think that’s already been done,” Finebaum said. “But it just doesn’t take anything nowadays. It just takes hearing something somewhere.”
“You can’t even blame message boards anymore, because I haven’t seen one so long, I don’t really know what they look like,” he continued. “But, it’s just somebody putting something out, and then somebody asking you guys a question or me, and then somebody reporting it as, ‘Oh, Kalen DeBoer’s leaving.’ I have never heard one ounce of concrete information that indicates Kalen DeBoer is going anywhere.”
Centre Daily Times beat writer Jon Sauber published a coaching hot board last week, calling DeBoer Penn State’s “primary target” despite ranking him second behind Georgia Tech’s Brent Key. Sauber also told Tide 100.9 that DeBoer has “been one of Penn State’s top targets from the beginning” and that Alabama’s loss to Oklahoma “nudged the door open a little bit.”
“He’s been one of Penn State’s top targets from the beginning,” Sauber said. “I think it was, early on, a little bit pie in the sky, of course, Alabama’s close game with South Carolina, there was a chance it could have picked up there. It didn’t, and then the loss to Oklahoma nudged the door open a little bit.”
The reports gained enough traction that On3’s Chris Low felt compelled to shoot them down when he followed Finebaum on the same show. Low said a source close to DeBoer told him there’s nothing to the Penn State connection.
“I talked to somebody pretty close to Kalen last night, and they said, ‘No,'” Low said. “I know there were a couple reports yesterday that he was right at the top of the list or somebody they had been considered from the outset. Somebody I talked to who was close to Kalen said that that was not accurate.”
DeBoer is 9-3 in his second season at Alabama with a path to the College Football Playoff. The speculation comes despite Alabama being one loss away from playing for an SEC championship and DeBoer having zero public connection to the Penn State job beyond a beat writer’s hot board and the idea that losing to Oklahoma somehow made him a flight risk.
About Sam Neumann
Since the beginning of 2023, Sam has been a staff writer for Awful Announcing and The Comeback. A 2021 graduate of Temple University, Sam is a Charlotte native, who currently calls Greenville, South Carolina his home. He also has a love/hate relationship with the New York Mets and Jets.