The sakes for the 2025 Alabama football season are clear: return to the College Football Playoff after a miserable 1-year drought, or risk becoming just another college football team. After spending 16-plus seasons as the Main Character in college football, will the Tide continue as 1-of-1 or devolve into 1-of-136?
While the verdict is still many games away, we have piece of evidence: unranked Florida State 31, No. 8 Alabama 17.
The loss drops Alabama to 0-1 on the season, extends its losing streak to two, and moves Alabama to 5-5 in its last 10 games. Not 5-5 in its last 10 road games, or 5-5 in its last 10 again ranked foes, or its last 10 against Power 4 opponents. No, Alabama is 5-5 in its last 10 games, period. Included within that number is a 1-5 mark away from Bryant-Denny Stadium, the one win coming in a retroactively-surprising blowout of LSU in Tiger Stadium last November.
Alabama is under .500 in a season for the first time since a 2006 Independence Bowl loss to Oklahoma State concluded that season at 6-7 and brought Nick Saban to Tuscaloosa in the first place, and has now dropped consecutive games for the first time since the conclusion of the 2013 campaign.
But perhaps no number underscores Alabama's quick, dramatic, and perhaps inevitable slide like this one: 60.
That's the number of FBS teams that sport better records than Alabama's 5-5 over their last 10 games. Included among that group of 60 are vaunted names like UConn, Bowling Green, and South Alabama.
It's a run that began immediately the unquestioned high-point of the 14-game Kalen DeBoer era thus far in Tuscaloosa. Alabama defeated No. 2 Georgia in DeBoer's fourth game, moving the Tide to 4-0 on that season, 9-1 in their last 10, 204-23 since the beginning of the 2008 season, and extended Alabama's record streak to 17 consecutive seasons with at least one week as the AP No. 1-ranked team -- a record that feels bound to end this year.
Alabama lost its next outing after the Georgia win to a Vanderbilt team that fell to Georgia State just three weeks earlier, and the Crimson Tide have traded wins for losses ever since.
This isn't a story of the "vaunted" SEC "grind," either. Alabama's last 10 games include losses to unranked Michigan and unranked Florida State, along with a win over FCS Mercer -- not to mention losses to unranked Oklahoma (3-6 to close last season) and unranked Vanderbilt (6-4 over their last 10 games). Another 16 FBS schools have matched Alabama's 5-5 mark, also.
Below are the 60 teams better than Alabama over their last 10 games, as well as the 16 equal to the Tide. SEC and in-state teams are in italics.
9-1 (2)
Ohio State, Oregon
8-2 (16)
Arizona State, Army, Boise State, BYU, Georgia, Indiana, Marshall, Memphis, Miami (Ohio), Notre Dame, Ohio, SMU, TCU, Tulane, UConn, UNLV
7-3 (19)
Arkansas State, Bowling Green, Florida, Illinois, Iowa State, Jacksonville State, Louisville, LSU, Miami, Minnesota, Missouri, Navy, Ole Miss, Penn State, South Carolina, Syracuse, Tennessee, Texas, Texas State
6-4 (23)
Baylor, Buffalo, Clemson, Colorado, Colorado State, Duke, East Carolina, Georgia Southern, Iowa, James Madison, Kansas, Kansas State, Liberty, Louisiana, Michigan, Northern Illinois, Sam Houston, South Alabama, South Florida, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Vanderbilt, Western Kentucky
5-5 (16)
Air Force, Arkansas, Boston College, Georgia Tech, Louisiana Tech, Nebraska, New Mexico, NC State, Old Dominion, Toledo, Troy, USC, UTSA, Washington State, West Virginia, Western Michigan
The obvious rebuttal to the "Alabama is just another program" argument is existence of this very article. Alabama losses still feel like events. The top thread on the Reddit college football page this week is the postgame reaction to Florida State 31, Alabama 17, with more than 12,000 upvotes and 4,100 comments. Three of the next five top threads are about the loss as well. As of a year ago, four of the top eight threads in r/CFB history are Alabama losses, and a fifth is Nick Saban's retirement. After more than a decade and a half of bullying the rest of college football, the rest of the country enjoys seeing the Tide humbled. (Also, Reddit has bias toward negativity and schadenfreude.) That isn't going to end in the near future, either. The rest of college football will still enjoy seeing Alabama lose, and the Crimson Tide team that took the field at Doak Campbell Stadium on Saturday has plenty of losing in its future.
But the real worry for Alabama isn't that the nation will spend several weeks this fall dogpiling on the Crimson Tide. The ultimate nightmare is a college football Saturday when an Alabama loss isn't remarkable at all.