Vanderbilt stuns Alabama: The REAL first day of college football’s post-Nick Saban life

There were plenty of games during Nick Saban’s 17 years leading the Alabama football program where his Crimson Tide were in surprising, four-quarter battles with unranked teams they were supposed to blow out. 

Time and time again, Alabama won. Aside from a loss to ULM in Saban’s first year, Alabama won those games without fail. While the entire college football world flipped the channel to witness the upset — much like millions of people did Saturday afternoon — the Crimson Tide ruined the show and pulled out the game. 

Saban’s coaching career at Alabama is an almanac of statistics that seem made up. Saban was so good, he makes numbers feel like science fiction. We’ll visit a few in this column. But here’s one to put things into perspective: when Alabama lost to Texas A&M at Kyle Field in 2021, that broke the program’s 100-game win streak over unranked opponents. One hundred games.

This didn’t happen. What occurred Saturday — Alabama’s 40-35 loss at Vanderbilt — is unconscionable. It’s so bizarre, so foreign, so unsettling, it makes you want to sift through the debris and come up with an explanation for how the impossible could happen.

Here is one cold, hard and indisputable fact: Alabama has not looked this mortal, this vulnerable, this, well, weak in almost two decades. 

Figuring out why an hour after the game may not be possible.

But let’s take a stab at it.

Here’s a theory I’ll borrow from golf. When Tiger Woods was at the height of his dominance in the PGA Tour, he’d find himself on the back nine of major tournaments against other golfers separated by a few strokes. So intimidated by the presence of the great Tiger Woods, so many of those professional golfers messed up, wilting in the heat of the moment. People wilted around Woods even when he wasn’t playing spectacularly. The image, the reputation of the man made others quiver. Psychology is so much of sports.

It was present Saturday within people not even playing the game. Even as fans watching Vanderbilt’s remarkable win unfold, we were all waiting for the Commodores to blow it. A fumble, a turnover, a dumb penalty, something. It felt like a ticking time bomb was about to go off and Vanderbilt would just implode, just allow Alabama to get away with it like the Crimson Tide did over and over and over again during Saban’s tenure.

Was Saban’s absence the reason for Alabama’s mortality on this day? One of Saban’s superpowers was keeping his teams up, playing at peak performance even in traditional letdown spots.

Saban being gone probably tells some of the story. But that wasn’t all of it.

Vanderbilt just straight-up beat Alabama. This upset felt different from so many others like it, even the ones Alabama wasn’t participating in. This wasn’t a sleepwalking giant who woke up too late or a team suffering a hangover from an emotional win seven days prior.

It may have started off feeling that way. Vanderbilt got out to a 13-0 lead early in the game — the second score coming off of a flukey pick-six — and it felt like all those other Alabama upset scares. Slow start for a team coming off a massive win? We’ve seen that before.

Here’s when it started feeling different: When Alabama punched back and got within two points in the second half, Vanderbilt kept swinging and landing punches. Commodores quarterback Diego Pavia was spectacular. Vanderbilt’s rushing attack was eating Alabama’s defense from the inside out. Clark Lea was dialing up an incredible offense game that never transitioned into “clock-mode” or playing not to lose. Vanderbilt’s defense forced game-turning turnovers. It converted 12 of its 18 third-down attempts. Big play after big play.

Even when freshman phenom receiver Ryan Williams caught a 58-yard touchdown pass late in the third quarter to bring Alabama within 2, Vanderbilt responded with a field goal to go up five. Then with Alabama getting the ball back down less than a touchdown, Vanderbilt strip-sacked quarterback Jalen Milroe and took the ball back. Vanderbilt marched down the field and scored again.

Then with the ball up by five with two minutes left in the game, Vanderbilt could have ran it three times, milked clock and played scared. No. Lea dialed up a pass on 2nd-and-12 in the game’s final minutes and Pavia hit Sedick Alexander for a 19-yard game that helped put the game away. So many other coaches would have been too afraid to pass it.

Maybe if Saban was on the other sideline, Lea would have? Maybe he wouldn’t have.

This wasn’t a lovable underdog beating a giant that didn’t take its opponent seriously enough. Vanderbilt lined up with Alabama for four quarters and existed in a high-powered game against the No. 1 team in the country. If you stripped the logos away, you may not have been able to tell which team was the 24.5-point favorite with a stark talent advantage.

Here is another crazy Alabama stat: Vanderbilt hadn’t scored 20 points against the Crimson Tide since 1996. It dropped 40.

First-year head coach Kalen DeBoer is going to hear a lot about Saban this week. This is a man who willingly left a cushy situation at Washington to replace the greatest coach of all time at a program that doesn’t tolerate losing, let alone games like this. He knows what’s coming down the pike.

And honestly, it’s really hard to contextualize how to feel about DeBoer. The truth is, there was nobody on earth this Alabama program could have hired to ever live up to the great Saban. And, we’re literally seven days removed from DeBoer beat Georgia, the type of win the legitimizes everything Saban built and the direction the program is still heading.

In this 12-team College Football Playoff field, Alabama is going to have every opportunity in the world to get back into the national title picture. In six weeks, this may all be a distant memory and the Crimson Tide may be back.

But here’s what’s gone forever: Saban’s Alabama.

Maybe a loss like this was the thing it takes to finally accept that as reality now.