Texas A&M seemingly has a solid squad this season, and head coach Jimbo Fisher clearly has a respectable football IQ. However, entering their game against the formerly top-ranked Alabama football team with a 3-2 record is not exactly what’s recommended.
But come to think of it, I can come up with something that looks even worse than that: losing to said 3-2 team when you’re supposed to be the most feared college football power in all the land, and that is exactly what the Tide did Saturday night.
As previously established, A&M looks decent, and coach Fisher knows his stuff. But regardless of all that, Bama should have convincingly prevailed in this one and didn’t. With that said, how big of a punishment would fit such a crime?
Obviously, when the latest installment of the AP Top 25 poll comes out Sunday, the Crimson Tide will no longer be sitting atop it. The question of the matter comes in, though, upon deciding where exactly they should sit.
I, for one, feel that the best way to judge Alabama is to drop them just under the fellow top-tier schools who have a “better” loss. In this scenario, I believe that those teams are Penn State and Ohio State (PSU just lost by three points at top-three Iowa, while OSU fell to top-10 Oregon by seven).
My reasoning for feeling this way is that while the Aggies are strong, they were still an unranked opponent and just a smidge away from being 3-3 halfway through the season. Logic dictates that losing to an unranked team looks worse than losing to a team placed in the top three or 10.
With that in mind, my current top ten would read as follows: Georgia, Iowa, Oklahoma, Cincinnati, Penn State, Ohio State, then Alabama, followed by Oregon, Michigan State, and Michigan.
Yes, knocking the Crimson Tide down six spots may sound a tad extreme (especially considering that Texas A&M is almost guaranteed to be ranked favorably in the new poll), but it isn’t fair to keep them ahead of the Buckeyes — and certainly not the Nittany Lions. The AP is supposed to rank teams where they deserve to be ranked that particular week, not where they will most likely be in the long run.
Now, as far as what all stands in Bama’s path to the playoff at the moment, their backs are officially up against the wall. Most likely they will have to win out, locking themselves in as the SEC West’s representative for the conference’s title game in the process. In said title game, Georgia is still the one who is expected to meet them there; so Bama will have to beat them, too.
After all of that, the Tide will possess a conference title and a 12-1 record, with only a single loss (that is both narrow and understandable).
But until all of that happens, Alabama should have to suffer the tumble that any other name would upon losing to a vastly inferior opponent; and right now, that means falling all the way down from No. 1 to No. 7.