They had their superhero back behind center, but it wasn’t enough.

They lit up the Neyland Stadium scoreboard for 49 points — 49! — but that, somehow, wasn’t enough.

They got 103 yards rushing and 3 touchdowns from their prized transfer running back, but that wasn’t enough, either.

The 569 total yards and 32 1st downs Alabama rolled up on a rambunctious Saturday in Knoxville? Nope, not quite enough.

They possessed the ball for a whopping 37:29, but that wasn’t enough time to prevent No. 3 Alabama from making the wrong kind of history against No. 6 Tennessee in a riveting, astonishing chapter of the Third Saturday in October rivalry.

For the 1st time since 2006, for the 1st time since Nick Saban arrived in Tuscaloosa, Alabama lost to Tennessee. The Streak is over, at long last, at 15 games, and those Neyland goalposts are probably parked along some watering hole in Knoxville right about now.

A Crimson Tide team filled with its normal Grade A brand of talent finally succumbed to the flaws that had weighed it down but never cost it a game.

Until Saturday.

Until it ran up against a team and a program that’s floating on air right now, that’s smack in the middle of a revival season that has it believing that anything is possible. Right now, Tennessee is the talk of college football. And on Saturday the Volunteers slayed the dragons from Tuscaloosa in college football’s game of the year — so far, at least.

And yet the Crimson Tide almost fought through all of that. They almost escaped disaster yet again, like at Texas and at Arkansas and at home last week against Texas A&M when the Aggies were 2 yards from beating them. But they finally got what they deserved, let’s be honest.

Some nasty numbers got in the way of those aforementioned glossy ones that should have been plenty good enough for Bama to squeeze out of Knoxville with a 7-0 record. We’ll take a look into 5 of those numbers as the Tide return home to pick up the pieces, host Mississippi State on Saturday night and try to map out an alternative path toward Atlanta and the College Football Playoff.

1. 17

Seventeen — count them, 17 — penalties on Saturday, a school record.

Those ridiculous 17 penalties cost the Tide 130 yards, and you better believe that the penalties alone probably cost Bama the game more than any of the other 4 numbers we’re going to dig up from this game.

The Crimson Tide didn’t discriminate when it came to the 1st and 2nd half, either. It had 9 penalties in the 1st 30 minutes and 8 more after halftime. Bama spread the flags out so much that it always felt like the next flag was coming on the next play, because it seemed like it was.

The penalties continued a horrible, season-long trend for Alabama on the road. In Week 2 at Texas, the Tide committed 15 penalties, which was a record under Saban that lasted a little more than a month. And don’t forget the 10 penalties Bama was called for in Week 5 at Arkansas. The Texas and Arkansas games were both victories, so the flags were no doubt used as teaching points by Saban the next weeks in film session before being filed away with the idea that surely Bama wouldn’t pull this road stunt again.

Well, it did, and it was worse than ever in Knoxville. And, worst of all, it finally helped cost the Tide a ballgame, a proud streak of dominance over a hated rival and just maybe a shot at going back to the SEC Championship Game and the College Football Playoff.

2. 567

While we mentioned the Tide piled up those 569 total yards that looked so great on the final stat sheet, well, directly next to the 569 was 567, the number of yards Bama gave up to the explosive Volunteers.

While Bama rolled up nearly 600 yards itself, Saturday’s game was a frenzied, chaotic track meet that began with the Tide allowing 21 points in the 1st quarter. It was the 1st time Bama allowed 21 or more points in 1 quarter since the 2nd quarter of the 2019 game against LSU, when the Tide gave up 23 points in a 46-41 loss to the eventual national champions.

Giving up 567 total yards isn’t exactly the recipe for a victory, especially on the road and especially to a program that hasn’t beaten you since 2006. Bama’s porous defense invited disaster, and disaster walked through the gates of Neyland Stadium and right onto the Alabama sideline. This wasn’t the Tide defense that stood tall in those close road wins at Texas and at Arkansas, when the game was there to be lost well into the 2nd half or until the final minutes.

Every time Bama’s offense answered a score by the Vols and tried to wrestle momentum away once and for all in the back-and-forth affair, the Tide defense snatched that momentum away by allowing a big play to the Vols and/or another score. Or the defense committed another of those laundry list of penalties that we bemoaned above.

Hendon Hooker rolled up 385 passing yards (and 5 touchdown passes), and the Vols rushed for 182 yards, too, so it wasn’t like it was just Hooker’s arm that was killing the Tide. Tennessee averaged a healthy 4.7 yards per rush, which means that whenever Hooker wasn’t torching the Tide, he was hurting them with his legs along with running backs Jaylen Wright and Jabari Small.

The Tide defense set an awful tone, and it continued killing the mojo right until the final possession, when the Vols somehow gained 45 yards in 2 plays to set up a game-winning field goal after Bama had missed a field goal of its own with 15 seconds left in the game. That’s hard to do, but the Tide defense somehow pulled it off.

3. 5

Yes, on this day the little, old number 5 was inexcusable and inescapable for the Tide. And the 5 was the number of touchdown catches that Bama somehow allowed to Tennessee junior wide receiver Jalin Hyatt, who set a school record with those TD grabs. Somehow, some way, the Crimson Tide allowed Hyatt to double his touchdown total in 1 astonishing afternoon. Yes, Hyatt came into the game with 5 receiving TDs and finished the day with 10.

Simply inexcusable and ridiculous, to say the least.

Hyatt had 2 touchdowns in Week 3 against Akron and then had 2 last week against LSU. But Pete Golding’s unit kept letting Hyatt get free, over and over and over again. He torched the Tide for a season-high 207 yards receiving after coming into Saturday with only 1 other 100-yard game, a 166-yard effort against … Akron. Absolutely hard to believe.

Hyatt’s other 4 receiving yard outputs this season — 28, 73, 58 and 63. So it’s not like he’s been setting the world on fire all season. Quite the contrary. Making things worse was the fact that he had only 6 catches on Saturday, so he was almost exclusively being lost by the Tide defense when it was time for Tennessee to score touchdowns.

He had 2 scoring catches in that forgettable 1st quarter, added 1 TD in the 3rd quarter and then, in winning/losing time in the 4th quarter, Hyatt added 2 more scores, including his final one with 3:26 left that tied the game at 49-49 and helped set the stage for the disastrous winning field goal as time expired.

Ironically, Hyatt didn’t catch either of the 2 passes from Hooker that set up that winning field goal in the final 15 seconds. So literally the only time Bama was allowing Hyatt to do any damage was when he was scoring himself. The fact that the defense kept allowing Hyatt to score touchdowns on a day he wasn’t hurting the Tide otherwise made his 5 touchdowns that much more unfathomable.

4. 0

Zero. As in, somehow, some way, 0 quarterback hurries in the biggest game of the season to date.

Again, hard to fathom. Even though the Vols gave up 49 points themselves (with 1 touchdown scored by the Tide defense), Tennessee’s defense still managed to pile up 9 quarterback hurries. In other words, it was making life even a little hard for Bryce Young by getting in his face at least now and then, even if Young threw for 455 yards in his return.

But Hooker was somehow never hurried, never thrown off his rhythm once?

There were other awful numbers we could pick out from the defense’s historically bad performance, team numbers and individual numbers, but we’ll stick with this one — 0 quarterback hurries. It’s hard to believe just typing it, let alone seeing it play out in a nationally televised game against a quarterback in Hooker that you know can kill you with his arm and his legs.

The Tide defense managed to allow him to do both, and let him accomplish both way too easily, and it cost them right until the bitter end.

5. 52

Of course, we save the worst number for last. Alabama will always curse itself because it allowed The Streak to end on a day when it scored 49 points.

Forty-nine points and you still managed to lose.

The Tide gave up the most points in a game since 1907. Yes, 1907! That’s exactly 100 years before Saban arrived in Tuscaloosa and started The Streak. And we thought it had been a long time since Tennessee beat Alabama before Saturday? Somehow, 2006 doesn’t seem that long ago when you bring up 1907.

And the 52 points allowed by Alabama was really 52 points. As in, Tennessee’s offense scored all 52 points. There were no defensive touchdowns by the Vols or special teams scores to make the output seem not quite as bad for the Tide defense.

Nope.

Alabama’s defense, with all that talent on it and with all that was at stake on Saturday, came out and got torched in the 1st quarter and never adjusted, even when Young, Jahmyr Gibbs and the rest of the offense was doing all it could to bail the defense out.

Saturday’s defensive meltdown was complete after Bama allowed 18 points in the 4th quarter and allowed Hooker to complete those 2 passes for 45 yards to set up the winning goal when the Vols had only 15 seconds to work with.

Perhaps if it just got the game to overtime, Bama could’ve made 1 or 2 plays on defense to rescue itself and the day. But it couldn’t.

The chaos ended in regulation with a simple 40-yard field goal, with the crowd rushing the field and with Alabama’s players trying to get off that field before the orange-clad stampede ran it over like the Tennessee offense did.