When Nick Saban, his coaching staff and his players wake up on Monday morning to begin preparations for Louisiana-Monroe, they won’t be the No. 1 team in the country anymore.

And that might not be the worst thing in the world.

Alabama stubbed its toe about a million times on Saturday afternoon, committing 15 penalties and a ton more mental errors. It was sinking in quicksand in the hot Austin heat, but somehow, some way, it prevailed, 20-19, over a Texas team that was unranked then but found its way into the new AP and Coaches’ polls on Sunday thanks to its gritty performance that included everything but a win.

Bama won while being served a huge dose of humble pie. It did everything in its power to lose Saturday’s game — blown assignments and missed tackles on defense, long periods of stagnation on offense mixed with a toxic lack of discipline — but Bryce Young reached deep inside his reservoir of big-play capability and stunning poise and pushed the Tide across the finish line.

The Tide is 2-0. But now it’s also No. 2 in the new AP poll, with defending national champion Georgia deservedly leapfrogging Bama into the top spot in the land after brushing aside FCS foe Samford, 33-0. The Bulldogs weren’t overly impressive, but they did pitch a shutout and didn’t stumble all over the field for the better part of 3.5 quarters like the Tide did.

Saban’s shockingly mistake-filled team didn’t get what it probably deserved on Saturday. But it most definitely did on Sunday when the new poll was released. Somehow, just barely, the Tide remained in the top spot in the Coaches’ poll. But Georgia is coming for that top billing, too, because the Bulldogs are the defending champ, not Bama, and the Bulldogs are the ones who looked insanely good in their season-opening pounding of a ranked Oregon team.

Saban and Kirby Smart will rightfully say that rankings don’t matter, especially in mid-September, and they would mostly be right. Except, there’s a certain air of superiority that comes with having that 1 next to your name when the rankings come out, when you take the practice field during the week and when you line up for real on Saturdays. Bama no longer has that, it shouldn’t have that, and after a performance like Saturday’s, the Tide shouldn’t want the 1 next to it when it welcomes the Warhawks to Bryant-Denny next Saturday afternoon.

It should simply want to resume playing like the heavyweight it is, even with that 2 next to its name, because Saban’s team was a mess most of the day in Austin, no matter the result.

“It’s all about discipline, making the right choices and decisions, whether it’s post-snap, it doesn’t matter,” said Saban after Saturday’s escape act. “We’ve got to play better, there’s no doubt about that.”

Fortunately for Saban and his coaching staff, time is most definitely on their side to start playing better.

It’s only September. Bama’s world got shaken a bit at Memorial Stadium, maybe a lot, but its season didn’t die.

The schedule is on their side, too, with Sun Belt foe Louisiana-Monroe and Vanderbilt coming to Tuscaloosa the next 2 weeks against an angry and motivated Tide team that knows it got away with one in Austin and knows that many are doubting just how good it really is.

Alabama will have those 2 tune-ups to clean up the mess that was last Saturday in preparation for its SEC West opener at Arkansas on Oct. 1. Sam Pittman’s Hogs have looked physically dominant out of the gate in victories over Cincinnati and South Carolina and have risen to 10th in the AP poll. They suddenly look like the biggest threat to Bama making it back to Atlanta.

So the Tide’s next 2022 reckoning will come in Fayetteville on the first day of October. Until then, there will be speculation about what we all saw in Austin.

Was that the first red flag that this Bama team is great but not championship caliber?

Or was it merely a case of it being extremely early in the season, it being a tricky noon start, and the fact that Texas head coach and former Bama offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian is still very familiar with a lot of the Tide roster?

Those factors don’t excuse how sloppy Bama was, but they are all legitimate reasons for the game being far more competitive than anyone imagined, from the Vegas oddsmakers who threw up an opening 19-point spread to onlookers who didn’t believe the road environment would bother Bama like it did last year in Gainesville, College Station and Auburn.

Well, the Tide was bothered, big-time. And it was teetering all afternoon.

The other possibility, and the answer to this will come out over the next several weeks, is that maybe Texas is a whole lot better than anyone imagined. This happens every season. There’s a handful of teams who start the season unranked and end up living large in the Top 25 for the entire fall after entering it early. There are also always a few teams who start out ranked, maybe highly ranked (think Notre Dame and Texas A&M), who prove they didn’t belong anywhere near the Top 10 or even the Top 25.

Texas might fall in the former category. The Longhorns pummeled the same Louisiana-Monroe team that will visit Tuscaloosa this Saturday in their season opener and then got rewarded with a No. 21 ranking in Sunday’s AP poll after scaring the wits out of Alabama. The Coaches’ Poll did the same service to the Longhorns by putting them at No. 20.

Perhaps after going 5-7 in his first season in Austin without any of his players, Sarkisian is way further along than anyone realized, and last Saturday’s game was the first example of that. Perhaps we will look at Saturday’s game a lot differently in a few months. It will still wreak of an afternoon full of ridiculous mistakes for the Crimson Tide. But the struggles Bama had in general with Texas might just be a lot more understandable come November than we thought on Sept. 10.

Time will tell. Passionate college football fans aren’t usually programmed to let things play out, but that’s what Bama fans have to do here. Try to see the big picture. And if the picture doesn’t look any different in 3 weeks in Fayetteville, we’ll likely know that even Young can’t will this Bama team to ultimate glory.