Near the end of the regular season last year, Rolando McClain went into Alabama's inside linebacker meeting room and wrote out a challenge on the white board.

To beat it, a player had to produce statistically like McClain during one of his top games with the Crimson Tide while, like McClain during that game, making few -- if any -- mental mistakes.

For more than a month, no one checked all the boxes.

The player that finally did? Mack Wilson in the national title game. Making just his second career start, the then-sophomore posted a team-high 12 tackles and two tackles for a loss during Alabama's win over Georgia.

"I thought Rashaan (Evans), if anyone, had the best chance of anybody of doing it," McClain, the former Tide Butkus Award winner, said of the challenge. "It was a lot of stuff you had to do during the course of a game. But Mack did it in the national championship game. He actually exceeded the (stuff) I put on the board."

Bama has had some great inside linebackers. To McClain, who is around the Alabama building on a regular basis, Wilson has the talent to be the next great one.

He made an interesting comparison.

"Mack, he's built like Dont'a (Hightower) and is mean like Dont'a, but he can run and do all the other stuff like me," McClain said of the 6-foot-2, 240-pound Wilson. "Mack's cold. He can do a lot of things. If you just watch him play, he can rush, he can bend, he can run and (he's) mean. I like him a lot. ... I don't know if everything's clicked yet as far as mentally. I know Rashaan and Minkah (Fitzpatrick) and those guys were there to help him. But I think this year you'll see his leadership as well as just him calling a defense and taking over that. I think that'll develop a lot more this year."

Despite missing two games and being a situational player most of the year, Wilson finished last season with 40 tackles and a team-high four interceptions.

Now, Alabama is depending on the Montgomery native to be one of its defensive leaders.

So far, so good for the most part.

"Mack has done a good job," safety Deionte Thompson said during the spring. "He's the main signal caller for our defense. So he communicates it to the front and communicates it to the back end, and we've been doing a pretty good job of getting the calls from him this spring and communicating it across the board."

With Wilson and Dylan Moses, the Tide will have probably the most athletic inside linebacker tandem in the country.

Both have run sub-4.6 40s at Alabama.

More importantly, they're both capable of producing at a high level, as they showed while combining for 17 tackles during the Tide spring game and as Wilson showed during the national title game.

"I went back and watched the national championship game again, and it's like, OK, he can play," McClain said. "But this is his year where he's got to step up, and I expect big things from him."

Matt Zenitz is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @mzenitz.