There was a particular game against the Cleveland Cavaliers when Michael Jordan went off, which is saying a lot.

That night, Jordan finished with 69 points, but the moment that later became famous was when he told Craig Ehlo — yeah, the guy he devastated that other time — exactly what he was going to do.

“I’m gonna catch it on the left elbow, and then I’m gonna drive to the left to the baseline, and then I’m gonna pull up and shoot my fadeaway,” Jordan apparently told Ehlo.

Sure enough, that’s exactly what he did. And of course, it went in. It was like Jordan was so good that the only way to challenge himself was to give the blueprint of exactly what he was going to do and how he was going to do it.

I feel like that’s exactly what Nick Saban did to the NCAA.

In case you missed it, the Alabama coach was in midseason form before he arrived at the SEC meetings in Destin. He came out with an agenda on how to fix the current Playoff system.

“I think College Five (Power 5) conference teams should play all College Five conference teams. You know, and we should play more conference games,” Saban said in an interview with George Schroeder of USA TODAY Sports. “Then to me, losing two games wouldn’t knock you out of this, because you’d be playing more good teams. You can barely have a bad game in college football and survive it.

“And if you have it late in the season like we did it seems to have more significance in terms of how people feel about it than if you lose games earlier.”

Ah, but wait. There’s more.

Saban just told the NCAA how he cracked the code.

Not following? Let me explain.

So in Saban’s perfect world, he says that the best way to decide the Playoff is by playing as many Power 5 games as possible. For the record, he’s right. Nonconference play is huge for the selection committee, and Saban clearly knows that.

Saban also knows that while he advocated for the SEC to finally make a switch to a 9-game conference schedule, it has yet to do so. Neither has the ACC. Which two Power 5 conferences have been to the Playoff every year, you ask? The ACC and SEC. Who’s the only team with a Playoff berth in each of the 4 years of the system, you ask? Saban. I mean, Alabama.

You know what Alabama hasn’t had on its schedule during the Playoff era? Multiple nonconference games vs. Power 5 teams. The Tide don’t have any future nonconference schedules with multiple matchups vs. Power 5 teams, either. Saban is telling the NCAA, “There’s a better way to do this, but until you actually force me to do it, I’m going to keep exposing your flawed system.”

Why should Alabama schedule multiple Power 5 nonconference matchups if it earned 4 consecutive Playoff berths without doing that? There’s a loophole.

As long as Alabama schedules one premier non-conference game — Saban recently decided home-and-homes give the Tide an even clearer path to the Playoff — he knows his team doesn’t have to worry about the fact that it’ll only play 9 matchups vs. Power 5 teams while most of the other contenders (including Clemson) will play 10 before the conference championships. Shoot, Ohio State and USC will play 11 apiece this year.

Credit: Jason Getz-USA TODAY Sports

There’s no real reason to do that. The ACC and SEC aren’t getting punished for 8-game conference schedules. The selection committee doesn’t learn enough about conference strength during nonconference play, but there’s no motivation to change.

Saban would be foolish not to expose the flaw in the system. That’s not to say his team only earned Playoff berths because it was a step ahead of the NCAA. Obviously the Tide earned every win it got. Taking home two of the four titles of the Playoff era showed that Alabama absolutely deserved to be there.

But the goal for any program is to make sure it has a path to a Playoff berth. Alabama earned a spot in essentially every fashion possible already.

There overcame early conference losses by running the table and winning the SEC in 2014 and 2015. The 2016 team entered the title game undefeated and was a defensive stand from perfection. And then there was 2017, which saw the Tide suffer an Iron Bowl loss that ended conference title hopes, but not Playoff hopes.

Saban has seen it all. It’s interesting to hear him say that he wants to add more Power 5 matchups so that a potential 2-loss team can make the field based on an RPI-like metric similar to what college basketball uses for deciding the NCAA Tournament field.

If scheduling 11 Power 5 teams was incentivized by the selection committee, you can bet Saban would actually be doing that. Instead, Alabama is scheduled to play 9 Power 5 teams every year for the foreseeable future. Unless multiple Power 5 teams beat Saban in the regular season — something that hasn’t happened since 2010 — it’ll be awfully difficult not to include Alabama in the field of 4.

Right now, Saban is just toying with the NCAA. He knows the system is set up for his program to thrive, even if it flirts with elimination because of an Iron Bowl loss. Four Playoff appearances prove that much. Maybe he wants a new challenge. Or maybe this is just his way of showing the world that he’s a step ahead.

Until someone stops him, though, he’s going to keep knocking down that same fadeaway jumper.