ALABAMA DIDN’T LOOK LIKE A PLAYOFF TEAM AGAINST GEORGIA. SHOULD IT MATTER?

ATLANTA — Alabama looked sorely limited and plenty sad against Georgia here Saturday, so the 28-7 outcome in the SEC championship game reintroduced some urgent moral questions of the 2020s for a country delirious with football, from the only sport kooky enough to spawn such questions.

Here goes:

If you lose a conference championship game when other playoff-bound teams didn’t have to play a conference championship game because they didn’t earn the right within their conferences, should the College Football Playoff selection committee dock you in its rankings?

What if you not only lose but also look sorely limited and then plenty sad and your stats read like melancholia?

And: With No. 11 BYU losing Saturday, could No. 12 Miami (10-2) hopscotch up into the happy dozen, then revel, exhale and aim for the playoff as a potential force? And could Alabama (10-3), so often accused of receiving bouquets of favoritism in years such as 2017 and 2023, when it nudged into the four-team playoff at No. 4, topple from its No. 9 spot on the safe side of the bubble and wind up as the first team out in both of the first two years of the 12-team playoff?

“If you’re really looking at this game, it’s a 14-point game with 7½ minutes to go, and we had the ball,” second-year Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer said in the early evening in the news conference room at the floor of Mercedes-Benz Stadium. “That’s how I look at this game, and if this game applies to and takes away from our résumé, I don’t think that’s right. I really don’t.”

Yet if it happens in the room where it happens when the committee issues its findings Sunday at noon, it might owe less to the loss than to how that loss looked, even against a 12-1 Georgia ranked third and getting more and more marvelous, a team Alabama had beaten on the real road Sept. 27.

The Crimson Tide reached the last play of the third quarter with 82 total yards and a 21-0 deficit. It went through a 23-minute chunk of game time during which it lacked even one first down and looked as if rummaging around a thick forest to find one. It produced oddball clunkers on third-and-short plays as part of going 3 for 13 on third down altogether. It rushed for minus three yards, the first team in the storied Alabama history to visit that negative since the 1968 Gator Bowl. It looked as if hobbling somehow, as if it couldn’t do all the strategic things it would have wished to do.

Its field seemed to shrink; its passing turned to dinks.

All that wound up meaning something else looked strange: Alabama lost in an SEC championship game for the first time in its past 10 tries dating from 2009 and lost in Atlanta altogether for the first time after 17 straight wins. The sheer look of it coaxed a question about health, and quarterback Ty Simpson went the succinct route, saying: “It’s that point of the season. Everybody’s getting hit. Everybody’s sore in some type of way.”

DeBoer went longer, reeling through a list of players with ailments while acknowledging other locker rooms deal with same. He spoke of Simpson not getting to practice with “continuity” because of the absences. He said, “The execution just wasn’t quite as crisp, but there’s usually a reason for that.” He made the case that two weeks of healing before a playoff would begin would heal the crispness as well. “All those [dinged] guys, in two weeks, considerably different football team, the one you would have seen earlier in the season,” such as when the Tide won four straight games against ranked opponents between Sept. 27 and Oct. 18.

Out in the hallway, Alabama offensive lineman Parker Brailsford echoed that, saying, “I feel like, given a chance, we will do some great things.”

DeBoer even noted that when Georgia backup wide receiver Cole Speer came barreling around the corner to appear right on top of Blake Doud’s punt attempt during a scoreless first quarter, leading to Georgia’s opening touchdown, well: “We had a new face in the spot [on the line]. I mean, obviously, that’s LT Overton’s position. And I’ll just tell you what it is: There’s a check we’ve got to make, and you’ve got a new face in that spot, and that’s what happened.”

A committee once upon a time did view a team’s injury situation and factor it into a hard, hard call with the infinitesimal margins between teams. That happened in 2023, when Florida State sagged unmistakably in sharpness even as it won two games with quarterback Jordan Travis out for the remainder of that season after Nov. 18. The beneficiary of that decision was, of course, Alabama. Could a committee notice — and react to — a whole collection of dings, uncertain those dings would heal?

DeBoer, who came from working wonders in Washington in January 2024 to do something nobody should have had to do — replace Nick Saban — did not play Saturday to window-dress. With the score 21-7, after a third-and-two pass from the Alabama 12-yard line midway through the fourth quarter looked clunky, DeBoer went for it on fourth and two way, way back there. That pass to the right sideline looked hopeless, and Georgia took over and scored on a short pass that wound up demonstrating the frightening speed of Zachariah Branch.

“If we’re really worried about the score, then probably punt it on your own 11, right?” DeBoer said. “But I’m here to win an SEC championship, not here to [impress]. If you lose by one or you lose by more, it’s still a loss. And that’s what I was caring about; we’re here to win an SEC championship.”

So the score looked worse, but the committee, which includes retired coaches and players, surely noticed that. “Yeah, I mean, I’m not nervous at all, right,” Simpson said of the verdict coming Sunday. “It’s not up to me. You know, I think that our résumé speaks for itself. We went through a gauntlet of a schedule. The SEC’s the best conference in the country. That’s a really good [Georgia] team. And it’s pretty much simple as that, right.”

“I think the precedent’s been set,” DeBoer said, “and I don’t know how you can go into a conference playoff game, when you’re the number one seed [in the conference] and did all of these things throughout the year and playing in this game against one of the top teams in the country as well, how that can hurt you and keep you out of the playoff when we’ve done what we’ve done all year.”

Of course, there’s another precedent, again from that messy 2023. Georgia brought its 12-0 record and its No. 1 ranking to that SEC championship game, in which No. 8 Alabama clipped it, 27-24. The next day that year’s committee docked Georgia (12-1) clear down to No. 6, below No. 4 Alabama (12-1) and No. 5 Florida State (13-0), another December in a nutty, indecipherable sport.

2025-12-07T04:04:50Z