Different day, same story for Alabama football against Michigan. The Crimson Tide made several nice plays in the ReliaQuest Bowl, but it wasn’t enough.

All told, UA couldn’t get enough traction offensively. The consistency wasn’t there, and Alabama, a two-score favorite entering the game, lost 19-13.

“I have no clue,” defensive lineman Tim Smith said after the game, when asked what led to the inconsistency. “We go out, do our best. A lot of guys play to a higher standard when they get ready to play Alabama. It’s their Super Bowl. They’re ready to storm the field. So yeah, I’m not too much sure.”

All season, it wasn’t the big games that Alabama had trouble with. The Crimson Tide suffered just one loss to a ranked team, at Tennessee.

It beat Georgia, a College Football Playoff team. LSU was ranked when Alabama dismantled the Tigers in Baton Rouge, and South Carolina nearly made the CFP after losing to UA.

Even Missouri was a top 25 team, and the Tide scored a shutout in that game. DeBoer got the team up for the big matchups.

It was the games where UA was favored that were trouble, including Tuesday’s loss. The Tide fell to Vanderbilt for the first time in decades, and destroyed its own CFP hopes with a shocking loss at Oklahoma.

Tuesday, it all showed up again. Even with a few explosive plays, Alabama couldn’t consistently convert on third downs to extend crucial drives, and gave the ball away four times to begin the game.

That allowed Michigan to build up a 16-0 lead, something the Tide never recovered from.

“We were inconsistent in certain areas,” defensive lineman Tim Keenan said. “We gotta do a better job with that.”

The ability to keep his team ready for nearly every game was a hallmark of the Nick Saban era, and perhaps a minor miracle given the age of college football players. Saban would famously rip into reporters who suggested an FCS game might be an opportunity to see backup players in action, and claimed to treat every game as equally important.

The 2024 team didn’t show that trait. Though after the game, DeBoer suggested a way the Crimson Tide could use the experience to grow entering his second season as Saban’s successor.

“We’re going to take all these things that happened, and there’s some things that happened in the game today, too, that we’ve got to learn from and make sure that those mistakes don’t hurt us a year from now,” DeBoer said. “I don’t care if it’s turnovers, penalties. It’s everything. So to me, it’s a success if we move forward and we take advantage of the lessons, even though we don’t want to learn those lessons sometimes because they’re hard. We’re going to learn from those lessons, move forward, and be better next year because of it.

Alabama opens the 2025 season on Aug. 30, at Florida State.