How can Alabama get back to the apex of college football? SDS’ very own Chris Walsh is laying out a five-part series on how the Crimson Tide can become college football’s premier team once again.

Reclaiming the crown series:

It comes up each and every day.

Chris Davis catching the missed 57-yard field-goal attempt, racing up the sideline and going more than 100 yards into the end zone as time expired. While the home-team sideline erupted and fans stormed the field, most of the University of Alabama players were simply stunned.

That’s how the Crimson Tide’s reign of college football ended last season, with the incredible 34-28 loss at rival Auburn. It subsequently lost in the Sugar Bowl as well, 45-31 to Oklahoma, but it’s the play now referred to as “Kick Six” that the players can’t get away from at the practice facilities or at home.

Only now it’s being used as motivation, which is why the players are purposely being reminded when they’re in the weight room, locker room or running drills. Even if they weren’t, fans still regularly ask about the play and it remains a regular fixture on television.

“I get sick,” junior safety Landon Collins said. “I have to turn the TV (channel).”

Consequently, the Crimson Tide has been working hard during this past offseason to make sure that there will be no repeat; that it rebounds and responds to the way last season ended. Of course there’s only one way to do that, climb back to the top and challenge for another national championship after winning three of the previous five.

If it doesn’t, the Auburn loss won’t just be remembered for ending Alabama’s attempt at becoming the first team during the modern age to three-peat, but it could be known for derailing the Nick Saban dynasty.

Yet few believe that’s what is actually occurring.

Last week, voters in the Southeastern Conference’s poll for Media Days overwhelmingly made Alabama the favorite to win the league championship. Specifically, the Crimson Tide was named on 153 of 293 ballots while Auburn, which played in the final BCS title game, received 75 votes.

“It’s great to have that type of respect,” Collins said.

It followed suit to what most preseason publications and rankings projected, with Alabama second only to reigning national champion Florida State. Even among the dissenters, like The Sporting News opting for Oklahoma at No. 1, the Crimson Tide is considered a strong contender to be one of the four teams invited to participate in the first playoff.

Yet even though Alabama was just one play away from a perfect regular season in 2013, the past few months have been all about getting back to the basics, or re-creating the attitude when Saban first had the program on the rise — like when a 1980s movie has a montage about someone or a group trying to rediscover whatever it was that initially led to success.

“There’s a lot of things that when you try to re-establish an identity that are very, very important,” Saban said. “The first thing is everybody’s got to trust in the principles and values that helped you be successful to start with. No questioning anything, no judging anything. You’ve got to just do it.

“That’s what’s helped us be successful in the past. Players didn’t question it. They just went out and did it, they believed in it, they thought it would help them be successful and that’s the way it needs to be. The degree you can get that done is probably how much we will re-establish our identity.”

In coach-speak the term for this is one everyone recognizes, “buy in.”

“You have to trust in it, you’ve got to believe in it, you’ve got to check your ego at the door, not be selfish about it, do your part, do your role,” Saban said. “You’ve got to serve other people.

“You need leadership, you need people affecting each other.”

Although there are numerous theories about what went wrong with the Crimson Tide at the end of the 2013 season, almost none have anything to do with talent.

“We just didn’t come out ready to play,” was Collins’ response this past week, and senior wide receiver Christion Jones told reporters that he thought former quarterback A.J. McCarron’s comments blaming the younger players were unfair.

Others have suggested that there were too many distractions, and an entitled feeling surrounding the team. After Alabama defeated LSU, 38-17, on Nov. 9, the team played as if the championship would almost be a formality.

“We kind of lost focus on what the mission was last season,” senior nose tackle Brandon Ivory said in the spring. “Felt it then. I saw it at the end.”

Saban talked openly of being spoiled by success, which is something he’s seen with the fans as well, and that the players simply didn’t work hard enough.

Sometimes you just have to learn things the hard way.

“Playing for Alabama, we have such a winning atmosphere that you don’t know what it’s like to lose,” junior wide receiver Amari Cooper said. “I think it has definitely humbled us.”

So Saban and company got back to work. In February it was the unanimous choice among national recruiting services for having the best incoming class — again. Of the three coaches added to the staff two were returning, which helped steer the program back into familiar territory.

But the one thing Saban had to change and have was that buy-in factor, beginning in the spring, because without that it doesn’t matter who the starting quarterback is or who might win the open jobs in the secondary.

Last year proved that, so he’s been reminding the players that they could have easily played for the national championship again last season and didn’t. That’s why the Davis play hurt so much.

“It’s not about leading differently, because every leader on the team has the same goal,” Jones said. “It’s all about being consistent and how long are you going to lead the team through the ups and downs. The difference between the 2011 and 2012 teams was even though we lost a game leadership didn’t let the team bow down, which was kind of different with the team last year. There was a lot of small things that the leadership let get by, didn’t concern themselves with, that it should have, which led on to what happened.

“Now, we’re really paying attention to detail and the little things and trying to correct the small things, so that the small things in the end won’t be the bigger problem. We’ve got to be consistent.”

Overall, it wasn’t quite hitting the reset button, but the Crimson Tide again feels like it has something to prove. So cue the music from the original Karate Kid movie, followed by the training sequence from Rocky IV …

“It makes you hungry,” Cooper said. “It makes you aware of how losing feels, and you don’t want to feel that way again.”