There was a time when a loss by Alabama at home was bigger than anything else in the sport of college football.

Texas A&M 2012.

Ole Miss 2015.

LSU 2019.

This one didn’t really feel like that, did it?

Texas 2023?

It wasn’t a shock to the system, this one. No, this one was different.

By the end of Texas 34, Alabama 24, it all just felt inevitable. Some losses sting. Some cut deep with a jagged edge. This one was blunt force trauma to the face. By the end of it all, Alabama was unrecognizable.

Texas 2023? It’s where the mystique of Nick Saban’s Alabama ended and where one of the greatest dynasties the sport has ever seen was something to be remembered rather than celebrated on a Saturday night in Tuscaloosa.

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Did Saban’s dynasty die in the second week of the season? Is that what we just witnessed? It doesn’t even feel possible. It still feels like summer outside. Conference play is still two weeks away. And yet Saban was talking in absolutes after the game.

Alabama can either “grind,” he said, or “throw in the towel” and accept mediocrity.

“This was a test for us,” Saban said. “We obviously didn’t do very well. But it was the midterm, not the final.”

Blame the players? Nah, not me. This one felt more like a failure in leadership than anything else.

Everyone is going to talk about Alabama’s quarterback. Forget the offense for now. Texas quarterback Quinn Ewers threw for 349 yards and three scores against Alabama’s defense and he didn’t really look all that great. Ole Miss comes to Tuscaloosa in two weeks. Without drastic changes, what’s left of Alabama’s season will be picked clean before October.

Maybe Alabama salvages this season. We’ll see. Here’s the biggest indictment of all, though. No one can say that Texas is back after that win, but Alabama sure looks like it’s on the way out.

Saban hired his longtime friend, Kevin Steele, to coach the defense this season. It seemed like a questionable hire at the time but now it looks like a white flag of surrender. Texas coach Steve Sarkisian made Saban’s defense look antiquated and helpless.

How many times were Alabama’s defensive backs torched over the top? Ewers heaved moonshot after moonshot down the field and Alabama couldn’t stop it.

After the second week of the 2023 season, Alabama doesn’t look like a Top 10 team or even one worthy of the Top 15. The quarterback looks unreliable and the secondary is reliably bad. Saban coaches the defensive backs and Alabama’s DBs were the worst unit on the field.

The cracks began forming last season in the first game against Texas. Think back to the beginning of 2022. Does Texas look much different this season than it did back then? Not really. Alabama, though? Even with Bryce Young at quarterback, Alabama was lucky to get out of Texas with a victory.

Without a quarterback of Young’s caliber? No chance.

At one point during the first quarter, the videoboards in Bryant-Denny flashed a montage of Alabama’s current NFL quarterbacks. This is where Jalen Hurts, Tua Tagovailoa, Mac Jones and Young all played back-to-back-to-back-to-back. And now what?

How best to describe the Jalen Milroe offense? It’s lump-in-throat football every time Alabama’s quarterback drops back to pass.

It’s so pretty when things were going well. Other times? It was like watching someone run with scissors on an ice rink.

Even Alabama’s offensive line doesn’t really know what to think about Milroe.

On two separate drives, one of the most celebrated collections of XXXL athletes in the game committed a pair of silly penalties that wiped touchdowns off the board. There was the penalty for illegal man downfield in the first half and then the holding penalty in the third quarter.

It’s not that Alabama’s O-line wasn’t prepared for the moment or under trained. It’s just that on both occasions they had no idea what their quarterback was going to do next.

Unpredictable Alabama is something we haven’t seen in a long time, but something tells me that the surprises are just beginning.

Joseph Goodman is the lead sports columnist for the Alabama Media Group, and author of “We Want Bama”, a book about togetherness, hope and rum. You can find him on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr.