I believe there needs to be a caveat here.
We saw the transition of Bama's focus on offense start with the hiring of Locks in the spring of 2016: Foster's last season at Bama. The other three were mainstays in the defense, yes, but also in an era where Bama was playing out of their base set the majority of the time because they weren't facing many spread offenses.
2012 was the first season we saw a spread based team on a annual basis when Sumlin took the job in College Station.
I understand the feeling "we haven't seen an Alpha in that position." We also have to acknowledge Donta, Rolando, CJ, and others in that era weren't playing ball in this "modern day spread offensive era."