This is an opinion column.

There was always a playful aspect of the first game week Monday in Tuscaloosa.

Hot off the printer, sheets of paper would circulate the Alabama press room just seconds before Nick Saban would step to his podium. The choreography was military precision.

That was Depth Chart Monday.

R.I.P.

Cause of death: Annoyance.

Never again will a Saban lecture defining our favorite coordinating conjunction come from the Mercedes Mic next to the promotional soda and water bottles. Generations of sports writers will forget the meaning of “or” — a staple of the Monday before Labor Day weekend — when Saban reluctantly revealed what was previously called organizational groupings.

After 16 years of this ritual, Saban followed through on this threat from last year’s season-opening win over Utah State and dropped the ax.

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Now this isn’t a matter of strategic gamesmanship with Middle Tennessee State coming to town Saturday. If that were the case, he would have nixed it before playing one of the Labor Day specials in Atlanta or Dallas against USC or Florida State.

It’s even simpler than that.

Saban, essentially, doesn’t want the headache that comes with Depth Chart Monday.

A year ago this weekend, Saban railed on a postgame question related to starting lineups differing from the Monday chart.

“My biggest issue on the whole team was the day the depth chart came out,” Saban said foreshadowing this year’s move after the 55-0 humiliation of Utah State. “Y’all might have seen the last one …. Because that’s all you worry about.”

The tune was similar Monday when he kept that promise.

“It creates a lot of distractions on our team,” Saban said of the depth chart. “It creates a lot of guys thinking that, well, this guy won the job now and I’m not going to play or whatever. And quite frankly, we don’t need that.”

But when the message from the same podium offer deals with mental toughness and maturity, how does this reinforce that?

Not to go all participation-trophy-rant but are players that affected by seeing what could be bad news that’s probably already obvious internally?

Saban has a 16-0 record in season-opening games at Alabama when playing mostly Power 5 teams Week 1. Each of them overcame whatever adversity Depth Chart Monday presented.

Much like the complete abolition of media viewing windows, it came down to the irritation factor.

“If you wouldn’t take roll, I’d let you (attend),” Saban said after Aug. 1 practice. “The only thing you’d do is take roll. I mean and see who’s missing in flex and then I’d get 62 questions about ‘Why wasn’t this guy lined up where he usually lines up. I mean, if we would ask intelligent questions, it would be different about practice and it would be worthwhile.”

Like the padlocking of all but one practice a year, Alabama’s in a slim minority of SEC schools who now abstain from Depth Chart Monday celebrations. Only three of the other 14 keep depth charts theoretical in the public domain until Saturday, as AL.com’s Matt Stahl found. That group doesn’t include two-time defending national champion Georgia where Kirby Smart must also keep deep talent pools happy with only 22 starting spots available.

Down in Auburn, Hugh Freeze brushed off a question about the depth chart released Monday morning.

“I’m going to be totally candid with you: I don’t even have a depth chart, so I don’t know where that came from,” Freeze said. “I guess that’s from the SID world. I don’t do depth charts. It’s really nonsense. I mean, you’re going to play your 4-5 outside receivers and your 2-3 inside receivers in our system. I don’t care who runs out there with the first group or the second group. They freely rotate, so I don’t make much of those depth charts.”

And that’s always essentially how they were viewed at Depth Chart Monday in Tuscaloosa. The “ORs” flowed freely to delineate the competitions that continued into Week 1 and beyond. It’s hard to believe too many people believed the warm sheets of 8.5 x 11-inch documents were chiseled into tables.

But that message wasn’t universally received.

“I want all of our players to continue to compete,” Saban said Monday, “to continue to compete for playing time, to try to play at the highest level. And I don’t want anybody on our team to think that they’re a backup player or whatever. The depth chart kind of does that.”

So the speculation will continue. Message boards and social media pages will still crank the rumor mill as the informational vacuum only creates a black market for those distracting leaks.

Senior center Seth McLaughlin, one could presume, knows who’ll start at his position. Smart money would be on him. How does he feel about this?

“I don’t know if we put out a depth chart this year but I don’t know if it distracts us at all because what we put out there may not be exactly what we have on the first day,” McLaughlin said. “Game by game, Coach Saban is going to put the guys out there that are going to put us in the best position to win.”

True.

And that was also true in the Depth Chart Monday era when Saban won seven national titles.

Anyway, “or means or,” as Saban infamously said on the 2008 Depth Chart Monday. He was no less annoyed by the whole dynamic back then when he railed against hypothetical depth questions before a breakout Season 2 in crimson.

But he apparently found that tipping point where the late August tradition became too much of a hassle.

“Nobody’s entitled to play,” Saban said in his closing argument, “just because we put it on a piece of paper. And say this is the way it is today. I apologize for that, but it is what it is

No more Depth Chart Monday in these parts.

Party’s over.

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