Greg McElroy: Alabama is a victim of its own success

No. 6 Alabama is coming off its first loss of the season to No. 4 Tennessee … by a whole whopping field goal. Yet if you flipped on just about any college football talk show on ESPN or any prominent college football podcast in the last day or two, you’ve likely been flooded with talk about how Alabama suddenly looks broken.

ESPN analyst Paul Finebaum has been vocal that he thinks Saturday was Nick Saban’s worst-coached series defensively in 16 years. Fellow analyst Greg McElroy is pumping the brakes a bit.

“I hate, honestly Paul, I hate how much of the attention and how much of the conversation is centered around Alabama, because Tennessee ultimately deserves the praise,” McElroy said on the Paul Finebaum Show. “But that’s kind of where we’re at is you like to build up the dynasties and then you love to tear them down, I think that’s the world that we’re living in. It’s no surprise that that’s where we’re at following a week in which Alabama played poorly.”

McElroy’s larger point was that Alabama has simply become a victim of its own success.

When you win six national titles in 12 years that can happen.

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong in asking the question, Paul,” McElroy said, referring to some of the popular talking points this week. “I don’t think anything’s been below the belt. I mean there are questions. It’s reasonable.

“And it’s partly because of Alabama’s own excellence. Alabama is a victim of their own success in some ways in that the standard we hold them accountable to as media members, as fans, as past players, the standard that they’re held to is not the standard of everybody else.”

For Greg McElroy, Alabama still showed heart

If anything, McElroy came out of the weekend proud of the Crimson Tide. It’s worth noting he was not in Knoxville, Tenn., for the game this weekend as he was on assignment calling the Florida–LSU game.

“Alabama, I actually came away, if I’m completely honest, as a fan of the Crimson Tide, I came away almost proud of the fact that they were down 28-10, everything was working against them, it was looking really, really grim, they’d looked uninspired, they looked like they were tight, yet they found a way to make it competitive to where they had the lead with only a few minutes left to play,” McElroy said.

“Granted they capitalized on Tennessee’s mistake in order to get the lead, but either way I was proud of the effort. Now, that thing could have gotten real sideways, because I have seen Alabama teams get down like that, ala the 2018 national championship against Clemson. I’ve seen Alabama teams get down like that and quit, and that got ugly, the national championship game there in 2018.”

So while Alabama does have some question marks, McElroy mostly just seemed to think it’s too early to start writing off the 2022 season as a whole for the Crimson Tide.

After all, the loss was a cross-divisional one that won’t prevent Alabama from reaching Atlanta with one loss and the chance to get to the College Football Playoff again.

The Crimson Tide didn’t give up Saturday, either.

“That wasn’t the case this past weekend. They played awful,” McElroy said. “Tennessee took advantage of their poor play, got a big lead and then they did what they had to do to climb their way back in. They came up short in the end, but ultimately I’m sure they can probably look back at it and point to, ‘Hey, this was a mistake, this was a mistake,’ maybe the outcome would be different.

“Either way this was Tennessee’s night, they deserved to win without question.”