This is an opinion column.

Tommy Tuberville has lost before, but not like this.

He’s lost jobs. But getting fired from a coaching gig ends with multi-million dollar payouts. Auburn gave him $5 million to go away.

He’s lost money, not all of it his. When it turned out his partner in his investment business didn’t have a license to deal securities, that guy went to prison. Tuberville pleaded ignorance and never faced charges.

He’s lost games — once to Vanderbilt. Yes, this man lost to Vandy, and there are memes that follow him around the internet for it.

But he’s never lost like this.

On Tuesday, Alabama’s senior senator announced he would drop his hold on more than 400 military promotions. Talking to press outside the capitol, he said he fought the Democrats to a draw.

“It was pretty much a draw,” he said. “They didn’t get what they wanted. We didn’t get what we wanted.”

A draw?

He thinks that, because there’s no scoreboard, nobody can tell who won here.

It wasn’t him.

And it wasn’t Alabama.

Let’s be clear. Tuberville has been right about one thing. Democrats could have ended this blockade a long time ago. They took their time because losing in politics is not a finite thing — and when your opponent is losing as badly as Tuberville has been, you don’t step in to stop him.

For months, Senate Democrats and even President Biden have used Tuberville as Exhibit A for Republican hypocrisy.

“The Republican Party used to always support the military, but today they’re undermining the military. The senior senator from Alabama, who claims to support our troops, is now blocking more than 300 military operations with his extreme political agenda,” Biden said in July. “Tens of thousands of America’s daughters and sons are deployed around the world tonight, keeping us safe from immense national security challenges, but the senator from Alabama is not.”

For Democrats, Tuberville was a useful tool. Anytime Republicans attacked them for being soft on national security, all they had to do was turn the conversation to Coach.

Privately Republican colleagues had pushed Tuberville to drop his blockade of the military promotions. When that didn’t work, they began to do so publicly.

In November, a handful of Senate Republicans moved 61 promotions, one-by-one to the Senate floor, and one-by-one Tuberville froze those promotions with his objections.

“No matter whether you believe it or not, Sen. Tuberville, this is doing great damage to our military,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina, said.

Having milked as much as they could out of Tuberville’s failure, Democrats threatened last week to change Senate rules to break the impasse. Late last week, Tuberville promised his caucus he would concede first.

Three years have gone by in a flash, but we are now at the mid-point of Tuberville’s term in office.

It’s halftime for Coach.

And what does he have to show for it?

Before he even swore the oath, he blundered through an interview where he failed to name the three branches of the federal government.

“You know, our government wasn’t set up for one group to have all three branches of government,” Tuberville said. “It wasn’t set up that way, our three branches, the House, the Senate and the executive.”

He has said Democrats want to pay reparations to people who commit crimes.

“They want reparations because they think the people that do the crime are owed that,” Tuberville said at an October 2022 Trump rally in Nevada. “Bullshit. They are not owed that.”

And there were several weeks when he refused to clarify comments in which he seemed to defend white nationalists.

“I call them Americans,” Tuberville said.

When CNN’s Kaitlin Collins gave him an opportunity to clear things up, he didn’t do so well then, either.

“A white nationalist is someone who believes that the white race is superior to other races,” Collins said.

“Well, that’s some people’s opinion,” Tuberville replied.

It’s actually the dictionary definition, but moving on.

None of this would be forgivable, even if Tuberville were delivering for Alabama. But he isn’t doing that, either.

Instead, he voted against $1.4 billion of federal dollars allocated for Alabama broadband expansion and then cheered the program after it passed over his objections.

And we won’t even get into Space Command.

The bottom line is this: Tommy Tuberville is awful at this.

And there’s little hope of him getting any better.

It’s halftime for Coach, but the outcome is decided. Alabama lost the day he was elected.

And this time, there’s no $5 million buyout to make him go away.