You might remember them — the happy reader of AL.com ready to attack hump day with the bliss of ignorance that wouldn’t survive the sunlight hours.

Approximately 10 years later, you woke up this Wednesday in a different version of reality. Somewhere a lost civilization of the Amazon lives in a world where Nick Saban’s prepping for Year 18 in Tuscaloosa.

Back here, we’re talking about Maurice Linguist.

Try that name on Last Wednesday Morning You.

He’s reportedly the latest addition to Kalen DeBoer’s new Alabama coaching staff — a fascinating collection of football minds that’s continuing to reshape this wrinkle in the matrix.

Linguist is interesting for the same reason as Kane Wommack. They’re two of the 10 on-field assistants reportedly scooped up by DeBoer, hired this past Friday.

As of Tuesday night, eight of those 10 on-field slots are filled, and the composition of the group would be the biggest story if not for the aftershocks of Saban’s retirement.

Linguist on Tuesday and Wommack on Monday became FBS head coaches who left the top of their respective pyramids to become a building block on DeBoer’s. It’s not unheard of for a head coach at a Group of 5 school like Buffalo (Linguist) or South Alabama (Wommack) to leave for an assistant job.

Recall Saban himself left a similar school, Toledo, after his first season as a head coach in 1990 to be a defensive coordinator with the Cleveland Browns. Worked just fine for him.

Kent State’s Sean Lewis left the MAC to be Deion Sanders’ offensive coordinator at Colorado. And FCS titan North Dakota State lost its head coach, Matt Entz, to be an assistant at USC.

There are others but Alabama’s collecting them in this race to complete a staff, salvage the roster and recruiting classes before the buzzards have nothing lift to circle.

The pie chart for the reported members of the staff has a notable distribution. So far, two of those eight are returning assistants from the 2023 Saban coaching staff. One on each side of the ball with Robert Gillespie leading the running backs and Freddie Roach with the defensive line.

You have the two head coaches, both on the defensive side with Wommack as the defensive coordinator and Linguist with the defensive backs. He replaces Travaris Robinson, a key member of last year’s group and a top target for retention. After leaving for Georgia, Robinson reportedly interviewed with DeBoer for the defensive coordinator job.

Ultimately, he turned down the Tide. That’s interesting because one of the four additions who followed DeBoer from Washington did the same a year ago with Saban. Ryan Grubb was in Tuscaloosa late last January as Saban worked to replace Bill O’Brien. An in-person, on-campus interview means business, but Grubb opted to stay at Washington with DeBoer. They’ve been a tag-team tandem for years, a bond strong enough that Saban couldn’t lure him away.

He’s part of an offensive core that makes the move including receivers coach JaMarcus Shephard, offensive line coach Scott Huff and tight ends coach Nick Sheridan. They were behind the nation’s most explosive offense a year ago, not insignificant.

So much of the current conversation surrounds everything besides the X’s and O’s on Saturdays in the fall. It’s about the roster, current and future, with so much recruiting firepower about to collect retirement benefits.

The good news for Alabama is it retained the two best recruiters if you follow the 247Sports ranking of the 2023 class. Gillespie was No. 2 and Roach was No. 3 in terms of assistant coaches nationally that cycle.

Huff was 98th. Shephard was 115th.

Comparing the pitch to Washington and Alabama makes these numbers unreliable. And the Huskies didn’t make the national title game last week built solely on high school recruiting.

It’s more complex in 2024.

They hit the portal, landed a Heisman runner-up in Michael Penix and several key offensive parts to build an offensive nightmare for opponents. That effort becomes an internal fight to keep those former top prep prospects in Tuscaloosa and out of the portal.

Losing Robinson to Georgia was huge in several ways, specifically in the effort to keep Caleb Downs in crimson. The former 5-star recruit who was viewed as one of the top young defensive players to ever come through Saban’s program was very close to Robinson in Tuscaloosa.

Florida State’s already picked off five Alabama transfers. Texas got Isaiah Bond and Kendrick Blackshire. So far, six have entered the portal since Saban retired while 5-star receiver Ryan Williams headlines the decommitments.

All eyes are on this Alabama’s staff’s ability to shore up the roster and get some of these high-profile recruits back in the committed category.

This will be a year smothered in comparisons to the previous regime so if this staff wants to keep the whispers hushed, splash some water on the roster fire.

What’s notable is the modern composition of this staff — not necessarily following a traditional formula or something Saban would have built. A tweet from Chris Vannini of The Athletic spoke to that.

Nick Saban: Hiring fired head coaches

Kalen DeBoer: Hiring active head coaches

DeBoer, a Group of 5 head coach himself as recently as 2021 at Fresno State, is picking off his previous contemporaries to join his bid to defy gravity.

It’s the kind of thing that can’t be fully judged for some time, but the chatter doesn’t wait for a final verdict.

Good Wednesday morning, AL.com reader.

Who knows what’ll happen today?