When Nick Saban retired from coaching Alabama in January, the university lost not just a football coach but a one-of-a-kind business asset. Saban was an enrollment magnet who transformed the school’s student body by attracting out-of-state students to Tuscaloosa. He had the same effect on players, who flocked to Alabama in a way that became self-fulfilling over the years. If a five-star recruit wanted to play in the NFL, Saban was the ideal person to get him there. In the past few years of outside groups being allowed to pay players and recruits, a much-talked-about “Saban discount” took hold at Alabama. The Crimson Tide has not been thought to tower above the rest of college football in outside-donor spending on its players, but Saban’s appeal made sure that the Tide always had the best roster anyway, or very close to it.

Seven games into new coach Kalen DeBoer’s tenure, Alabama has lost something else: its poise. The Tide lost at Tennessee last Saturday to fall to a humiliating 5–2 in its first seven games, a level of ignominy unknown to the program since 2007, during Saban’s first year. A game this weekend against Missouri threatens a catastrophic third loss before the end of October. The unthinkable has become thinkable, as the Tide stares down the substantial likelihood of missing the newly expanded 12-team College Football Playoff. A loss at Vanderbilt two weeks ago was perhaps the most shocking in program history. This latest loss in the state of Tennessee was not nearly as surprising, both because the Volunteers are an SEC contender and because the nation’s view of Alabama deteriorated sharply after the Vanderbilt failure. Alabama, for the time being, is not the Alabama you have come to know.

What has gone wrong? Not the roster itself. The Tide lost a couple of high-end players in the immediate wake of Saban’s retirement, but it prevented a mass exodus. Recruiting ratings say that DeBoer’s first team, full of mostly Saban’s players, is the most talented in college football. Nobody of any repute expected Bama to remain Saban good forever, as that would mean winning roughly one in every three national championships in perpetuity. But a fall was not supposed to come this soon, with a best-in-class roster and a serious coach following Saban. DeBoer has done nothing but win at his prior head coaching stops, most recently taking Washington to the national title game in his second year in that job.

The issue not being talent, Alabama has faltered in other ways. Instead, in its two losses to date, the team has victimized itself by doing a lot of what football coaches would call “dumb shit.” The Tide’s first seven games without Saban—but with a Saban-esque roster—have laid plain what a difference-maker Saban was, in ways that went beyond making sure Bama always had the best players.

The loss to Tennessee was a succession of Alabama mistakes. Quarterback Jalen Milroe threw one of the ghastliest interceptions of the season in the first half, lobbing the ball directly to a defensive back in the end zone on second-and-goal from the 3-yard line. The throw was an amateur mistake—the kind Milroe might have made early in the 2023 season, when he was struggling badly before morphing into one of the most effective quarterbacks in the country. (He threw two interceptions in his final eight games after throwing four in his first five.) This year, under a new head coach and offensive coordinator, Milroe has already matched last season’s six interceptions in his first seven games.

Other mental errors abounded last weekend. The Tide’s penalties included two false starts, a delay of game, an intentional grounding, an illegal substitution, and a crushing late personal foul assessed to defensive back Kendrick Law after a play was over. That call wasn’t a good one, as a Tennessee player instigated a mini-confrontation with Law and got away with it. But officials tend to catch the second guy in a fracas, not the first, and the 15 yards against Alabama turned a fourth-and-7 with the game on the line to a fourth-and-22. On that play, running back Justice Haynes appeared to miss a blocking assignment, leading to a nearly impossible conversion becoming even less possible.

The mood around Alabama is so bleak that fans and media are even finding mental errors where none exist. A whole news cycle ensued early this week over some wide receivers, who were uninvolved in a play, miming a basketball shot as they stood off to the side. Later, Alabama’s offensive coordinator indicated that they were told to do that, maybe as a way to distract the defense on a play where they had no other job. It’s been jarring to watch a fan base so used to success be forced to confront the kind of silliness that Bama normally eludes.

Alabama’s fans will eventually be fine, probably. But the defense may not. It ranks 19^th in the country by SP+, an opponent-adjusted efficiency stat, its worst ranking in more than a decade. (That’s still pretty good, but this is Alabama.) The Vanderbilt loss was the program’s biggest defensive embarrassment in many years, not just because the Tide couldn’t stop Vanderbilt but because of the on-field meltdown that occurred as the Tide was struggling. Senior safety Malachi Moore, a program leader, later issued an apology for a scene that included him kicking a ball in frustration and seemingly declining to be substituted out.

It’s not as if Alabama never lost its center of gravity when Saban was in charge. The Tide had various episodes in its rare losses under him, including a handful in the Iron Bowl game with Auburn alone. My personal favorite was the time Auburn used a little substitution trick to persuade Alabama to take a game-losing illegal substitution penalty. A close second was the time Alabama lost the ability to get a play off or complete a snap from the center to the quarterback as Auburn roared to victory. The reality of being more talented than everyone else (save, sometimes, for Georgia or Ohio State) is that every loss meant that Bama definitionally lacked its best stuff. But it did not happen this frequently under Saban, who never turned in performances this bad in two weeks out of three. And, really, Alabama played just as poorly in a victory over South Carolina in between the two losses to Tennessee and Vanderbilt.

Long range, Alabama will be fine. Saban’s rule ensured that the Tide will have a lasting financial advantage on almost everyone else, even the other blue-blood football schools. Financial advantages can be squandered, but Alabama is playing in a small pool. Saban’s lasting gift to the program is that Bama will never be more than a good coaching hire or a few good recruiting classes away from winning it all. At this moment, Alabama could still get hot and sneak into the playoff at 10–2.

Then again, the same is true of Ole Miss. For now, Alabama is a normal, flawed team with lots of talent. There are no perfectly assembled machines in college football, a sport that gets pretty messy by nature. There are only powerful contraptions with varying degrees of loose bolts. In addition to everything else Saban represented to Alabama, it has become clear how much of his brilliance was in quality control. Without him, Alabama is more talented than everyone else but, it turns out, just as easy to break.