No easy wins left for Alabama Football in a post-Nick Saban world

Outside of winning six national championships, perhaps Nick Saban's greatest gift to Alabama football was giving fans so many anxiety-free Saturdays every season. Those days are now over, a fact that Crimson Tide fans are struggling to get used to. Myself included.

Clemson head coach Dabo Swinney once said regarding his alma mater: "it's Alabama and the rest of ya'll." Alabama is now among the "rest of ya'll." The air of invincibility the Crimson Tide had, notably impervious to major upsets, is gone. Alabama is just another good team now. Nothing more, nothing less.

And good teams sometimes have to struggle to get victories. Good teams lose some games they shouldn't. Under Saban, if Alabama was a three touchdown favorite, it was rare that the game was competitive. Even games that were supposed to be competitive often weren't.

Saban had a quality that DeBoer doesn't have, at least not yet. Saban had the ability to step on an opponent's neck and not let up. He knew the buttons to push on his team to make them keep the pedal to the floor.

Saban's most epic sideline meldowns tended to happen when the Crimson Tide had a massive lead, often prompting the ire of media pundits who just didn't understand why Saban couldn't enjoy a victory. But it's that quality that made him the greatest coach in the history of the sport.

Because Alabama never played the scoreboard, that was a big no-no for Saban coached teams. They played to a standard, treating every snap like it was a tied ballgame. Now, much like most teams, the Crimson Tide not only plays to the standard of its opponent, but plays to the standard the scoreboard dictates.

Alabama led 14-0 on Saturday with under two minutes to play in the first half, and proceeded to self-destruct. They gave up a long touchdown on a 4th-and-9, gave up a safety on the first offensive snap following, and then threw an interception when they could have ran out the clock. A 14-0 game turned into a 14-12 halftime score. The next time the Alabama offense touched the ball, South Carolina had the lead.

The concerning thing is that this kind of thing appears to be a pattern for DeBoer.

Looking at a couple of games from last season, Washington had a 20-3 first half lead on Oregon in the Pac-12 Championship, and had to hold on to a 34-31 win. The Huskies led Texas by two scores with a little over a minute to play, and ultimately had to withstand a throw to the endzone to win by six in the semifinals.

People doubted Washington all last season because they won a lot of close games. They beat three win Arizona State by eight, scoring a season low 15 points. They beat three win Stanford by nine. After blowing out Cal in September, Washington's next 10 wins were all by 10-points or less.

At a school like Washington, winning the game is all that mattered. Prior to Saban, that was true at Alabama, too. Not so much anymore.

It's fair to point out that this is only the third season DeBoer has been a head coach at the power four level. He's still learning on the job, and shouldn't be held to a Saban-like standard. There's plenty of time to correct these issues, and develop a killer instinct that allows his team to put an opponent away instead of allowing a game to be close when it doesn't need to be.

DeBoer said after the game, "another game down to the wire. We're kinda getting accustomed to those."

For Alabama fans, myself included, we aren't nearly accustomed to them yet. Because for the last 15-years, close games were a rarity against overmatched opponents. During the Saban era, there were always games you could mark on the schedule as a "W" in the offseason and know you didn't have to worry about it.

You knew Alabama would bludgeon the opposition and you could spend the majority of the second half passively watching the Tide backups while perusing other games or getting some stuff done around the house.

Those days are over, and the quicker Alabama fans can accept that, the better off we'll all be. There's no guarantees left on the schedule outside of the Mercer game in November. Losing to Vanderbilt last week was the first clue, today's sloppy win over South Carolina proved it.

The rest of the season will cause a lot of anxiety. Games will come down to a handful of plays in the fourth quarter. Maybe Alabama makes the majority of them and finds themselves in the College Football Playoff, maybe they don't, and this Tide team will finish with a disappointing eight or nine win regular season leading to a meaningless bowl game.

This team is impossible to predict. All the fans who called so many Saban games "boring" because of the amount of blowouts can be happy knowing that every Saturday will be filled with suspense moving forward.