Malachi Moore's antics brings uncomfortable questions about culture under Kalen DeBoer

If you play enough football games, you're bound to lose some. All the greats lost games that left fans scratching their head. But it's how you lose, and how you win, that matters almost as much as the end result of the game. Alabama football lost to Vanderbilt. Typing it out still doesn't make sense. It happened.

It's as disappointing of a loss I've seen the Crimson Tide have, and I've been watching them for over 30-years. Maybe that's hyperbolic, I don't know. My lifetime has seen plenty of stinkers. LA Monroe in 2007, Northern Illinois in 2003, Louisiana Tech in 1999. None felt like this one.

Because this Alabama team was the defending SEC champions, fresh off of beating No. 2 Georgia a week ago in Tuscaloosa and on top of the world. Now they've lost to a team that never in its history had ever beaten an AP Top-5 opponent in a stadium that was probably 75% Alabama fans. The game might as well have been played at Bryant-Denny, save for the raucous Vanderbilt student section.

But more disappointing than the loss itself was what happened at the end of the game after 'Dores QB Diego Pavia iced the game with a first down run, once more mistifying an Alabama defense that looked like it was chasing ghosts.

Fifth year senior Malachi Moore is a leader on this team. A guy you look to for resolve and leadership in uncomfortable moments. A guy whose handprints are already in place at Denny Chimes, and whose handprints will be there for a second time after this season, an honor not many others have achieved.

Moore is one of the only players left from Alabama's last national title team in 2020. A true Nick Saban guy, playing four years under the best head coach in the history of the sport.

And yet, when it all came crashing down and reality officially sunk in for the Crimson Tide that they had in fact lost, it was Moore who let his emotions take over, completely losing his cool and pitching a fit on the field.

He first shoved Pavia's helmet on the ground when the game was iced. Following the first Pavia knee, Moore kicked the football after the official spotted in, egging the official on and mocking him as the flag was thrown. He threw his mouthpiece in disgust after that, somehow being left on the field by Kalen DeBoer and the coaching staff when he should have been sent to the locker room early.

It was a stunning moment. A meltdown unlike one we'd seen in the Saban era. There's passion, and Alabama players in the Saban era showed plenty of it. Sometimes that passion boils ove. There was the infamous Barrett Jones shove of AJ McCarron in the BCS title game against Notre Dame, in a game that was well in hand for the Crimosn Tide.

There was Ronnie Harrison and Reuben Foster getting into it on the sideline of the season opener in 2016 against USC, a game Alabama won 52-6.

There was Jermaine Burton scuffling with a fan following the upset loss to Tennessee two years ago.

These things happen, but this one was hard to watch. Moore is a passionate player, DeBoer said so after the game. We all know it, we've seen it for five years. We'd have liked to see more passion from the entire team for the full 60-minutes of gameplay, and not have it spill over after the game had been decided.

It was one of those moments that makes it clear that we're in a whole new era of Alabama Football. A moment that would have been quickly derided by Saban in the moment if he was on the sideline.

Instead, Moore was left on the field for the entirity of his fit. There's a certain expectation when you don the crimson and white. There's an extra expectation when you have a "C" on your chest, and you're a captain of a young defense that has a lot of eyeballs on you.

Coach Bryant said once, "I hate to lose worse than anyone, but if you never lose you won't know how to act. If you lose with humility you can come back."

How DeBoer handles this, and how Moore responds to it, will speak a lot to the culture of a locker room searching for answers after a shocking loss. And it will be the determining factor for if Alabama can come back.