At a certain point, it stopped being an anomaly.

Approaching the Alabama football record with 15 penalties at Texas was the first alarm followed by a 10-flag trip to Arkansas. After surviving both with dramatic wins, the school mark went down in Saturday’s loss at Tennessee.

The 17 accepted penalties were one more than the previous mark set in 1995 and 2002 and pushed Alabama to an unfamiliar place. Through seven games, the 66 Crimson Tide penalties rank dead last among the 131 FBS teams. Quantifying inconsistency can be a challenge but this supplies some degree of context to what’s been a seven-game run that’s spanned the spectrum of quality play.

Of course, not all penalties are the same as Saban discussed Monday.

“Too many pre-snap penalties, false starts on offense,” Saban said. “I think we had three in the game. And two of them were guys that they’re looking at the ball. They’re not even thinking about the clap or the snap count or whatever. Jumping offsides on defense, we had a couple of those.

“Those are the kind of penalties that are undisciplined, not focused, not looking at what you’re supposed to look at so we don’t have those issues. But they all put you behind the eight-ball.”

Alabama had six pre-snap penalties at Tennessee — four false starts and two for delay of game.

For the season, the Tide has nine false starts, four delays of game and three illegal formations.

The most common offensive flag is for holding with 11 over the seven games and three at Tennessee

“When guys are out there competing, sometimes we drive a guy to the ground and end up getting a holding call,” Saban said. “You like that kind of aggressiveness. You don’t want guys to hold. We’re certainly not coaching that, but there are penalties sort of of omission and then there are penalties that guys are just playing hard and trying to do the best they can and every now and then something bad happens. Easier to live with those than the others.”

Not every official box score notes who was the guilty party of the holding flags but Emil Ekiyor is the only starter on the offensive line who doesn’t appear to have been hit with one so far.

High penalty counts aren’t abnormal in the last few years for the Tide. Alabama was 101st last year averaging 7.1 flags a game after the 2020 title run included just 6.0 a game to rank 62nd.

The other title teams of the past decade ranked no worse than 60th in terms of penalties (2015). And the other four averaged no more than five flags a game, a long way from the current 9.4 average.

*National title team

On the defensive side, 21 Tide flags gave opponents first downs compared 16 Alabama’s received. Pass interference is the top infraction with 10 flags with four coming in Knoxville.

“We’ve been harping on pass interference, to keep our hands off of people,” Saban said. “I do think in some cases we do a good job of guarding them. We’ve just got to do a better job of timing up the swat or whatever.”

Saban had questions about a fourth-down pass interference flag late Saturday that negated a potentially game-ending interception.

Saban stopped short of advocating for video replay on calls like that when asked Monday.

“Look, my big thing is just consistency,” Saban said. “Just call it the same for everybody and it’s hard to define exactly what you can and can’t do. I would rather see that happen. In the NFL, they defined exactly what you can and can’t do and it’s a really, really difficult judgment call but you knew exactly what you could and couldn’t do. I think that would be beneficial. I don’t know whether it should be a reviewable call or not. I mean, if we make everything reviewable, why would you call anything?”

Other common defensive flags include offside (7), face mask (6) and illegal substitutions (3).

So, bottom line: Who is accountable and how is it fixed?

Saban said it begins in practice.

“I think we’ve gotta make players more accountable in practice for doing things correctly, paying attention to detail and doing the little things right,” Saban said. “We can’t go hang ‘em up for doing this. They’re our players. We need to get them to understand what they need to do not to allow these things to happen and understand the consequences of what happens when you do it, and I think if you continue to do it consistently, maybe we need to play somebody else.”

Saban said he told the team a story about a carpenter who uses a light to inspect his work for the most minor of flaws. He said opponents are doing that right now to Alabama’s game film, looking for the weaknesses to expose moving forward so there’s an urgency to correct this.

“There’s always a little fear that goes with respect and respecting what it takes to win,” Saban said. “You also should know that, hey, my job could be in jeopardy if I don’t respect the things I need to do to win.”

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.