You’d have to go all the way back to Nick Saban’s second season in Tuscaloosa. Expectations were relatively still low — at least by today’s standard — so it marked a rather pedestrian demerit, especially since it came in a win.

Alabama allowed Ole Miss to score 17 points to close the game. Believe it or not, Saban did not publicly blast his team for not finishing the game the way he wanted it to. Who cared if the Tide surrendered 17 points to close out a win? It was a win. Surely he was just relieved that a year removed from a disastrous 6-6 season, Alabama improved to 7-0 and kept its No. 2 ranking.

Saban coached in 129 more games before that finally happened again. Well, sort of. The second time it happened, the circumstances were a bit different. At the time, nobody knew if those 16 unanswered points that Auburn scored to close the 2017 Iron Bowl were going to prevent Alabama from earning a Playoff berth. That didn’t happen.

But that didn’t completely take the bad taste out of Alabama’s mouth. At least it shouldn’t have.

The last time we saw the Tide defense, it didn’t have an answer. Like it did against Clemson in the 2016 College Football Playoff National Championship, Alabama’s defense ran out of gas. This time against Clemson, the goals are obvious — don’t run out of gas and win the grudge match.

The question is if Alabama is vulnerable, or if it just had an extremely uncharacteristic rough stretch to end a game.

Credit: John Reed-USA TODAY Sports

The easy answer to that question is yes, of course Alabama is vulnerable against Clemson after last year’s dominant unit surrendered 35 points in the title game. And given the defensive struggles down the stretch in 2017, obviously Alabama is at the very least, vincible.

But there are other factors that show why Alabama’s defense could struggle against Clemson and potentially in a title game matchup.

Alabama has allowed 40 and 35 points the past two times it faced Clemson in the Playoff.

For all the talk about Alabama needing a month to get healthier before the Playoff, the Dylan Moses injury certainly didn’t support that narrative. That was on top of the injuries to Shaun Dion Hamilton and the Iron Bowl injury to Hootie Jones. Saban said as recently as Wednesday that Alabama had a “significant” number of injuries on defense.

Any deficiency is significant against the No. 1 team in the country. In case you forgot, Clemson is the No. 1 team in the country, not Alabama.

There’s also the fact that after shutting down Shea Patterson, Alabama wasn’t exactly stout against dual-threat quarterbacks. Kellen Mond, Nick Fitzgerald and Jarrett Stidham were all at least one score from beating the Tide, with Stidham obviously being the only signal-caller who pulled out a victory.

Will Kelly Bryant join that company? He’s no Deshaun Watson (yet), but he’s every bit as capable as those other three aforementioned dual-threat quarterbacks. And unlike Alabama’s defense, Bryant played his best ball down the stretch. He completed 79 percent of his passes for 252 yards and added a rushing touchdown in Clemson’s drubbing of Miami in the ACC Championship.

That was actually the third time that Bryant took on a top-20 defense in 2017. Including the Auburn and Virginia Tech games, he totaled 619 passing yards on 68 percent passing with 0 interceptions along with 160 rushing yards and 3 touchdowns. More important, Clemson won all 3 of those games.

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There’s obviously no guarantee that continues against Alabama. After all, the Tide surrendered a total of 7 points in its past 2 semifinal matchups. That doesn’t mean history will repeat itself, but it’s a favorable Saban stat.

He’s still only focused on the strengths and weaknesses of his 2017 squad. Against a battle-tested top-10 team, Alabama finally got to see what those really were on the defensive side. This is still a defense that never lets a dominant opposing tailback set the tone (Kerryon Johnson had just 3.5 yards per carry in the Iron Bowl). If Minkah Fitzpatrick is healthy, that secondary is still as good as there is in college football.

But even the best defenses have their limits. We saw that last year against Clemson. When Alabama’s offense slowed down after the Bo Scarbrough injury, it put that much more pressure on the Tide defense.

The national champions have averaged 38.8 points per game in their six Playoff games.

We don’t know what we’ll see from the Tide offense against Clemson’s No. 2 scoring offense. What we do know is that against its 5 toughest opponents (Auburn, Florida State, LSU, Mississippi State and Texas A&M) Alabama’s offense averaged just 24 points in those contests. Any defense is vulnerable when it has an offense that can’t sustain scoring drives.

That formula was Alabama’s downfall in the Iron Bowl. It took nearly a decade for that type of ending to finally happen to Saban’s squad.

In almost prophetic fashion, Saban said after the Auburn loss that one game did not define his team. The Tide’s 2017 story is far from complete. That’s the beauty of the Playoff system.

Those unanswered points might not be unanswered for long.

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