Will Texas A&M Ever Fully Break Alabama's Stranglehold on the SEC?

Every so often, a college football game touches down with the sort of metaphorical oomph that would seem to suggest a paradigm shift. That's how it was in Tuscaloosa in 2012, when Texas A&M defeated Alabama behind an undersized Drake-loving wizard named Johnny Manziel. At that moment, it appeared—not for the first time, and not for the last—that the bland but competent Nick Saban dynasty had finally been pierced by an opponent's improvisational brilliance; at that moment it seemed that the balance of power in the Southeastern Conference would inevitably shift west, toward the one SEC team based amid the recruiting manna of Texas, a program led by a charismatic head coach, Kevin Sumlin, who was credited for unleashing Manziel's genius.

So here we are, three years later. Everything is different and yet nothing is different: Manziel is in and out of trouble; A&M is on the verge of a top-shelf season but can't quite seem to break through; Alabama continues to teeter on the edge of College Football Playoff elimination; and, last week, faced with another must-win game on the road against a 5-0 A&M team, Alabama's defense returned three interceptions for touchdowns to ensure a 41-23 victory. It wasn't quite as bad as last year's 59-0 Alabama thrashing of A&M, but in a way it was almost worse, given all that the Aggies had supposedly taken away from that massive public embarrassment, and given all the ways A&M had sought to improve its fortunes since that day. In fact, it could be argued that last Saturday's loss was the most wrenching defeat of Sumlin's career at A&M. This wasn't supposed to happen again. This was supposed to be A&M 2.0, a new and improved version of the fast and loose squad that stunned the Crimson Tide three years ago.

Of course, this also was a statement of purpose by an Alabama team that Saban, in the wake of an early-season loss, began publicly crafting as a group of underdog outcasts. Maybe that's absurd, but it seems to be working, and more to the point, the paradigm remains unchanged. The mechanistic Crimson Tide are up here; the freewheeling Aggies are somewhere down there. And the question lingers: Is it ever going to change?

Take a look at the standings in the SEC West at the moment: it's LSU and Alabama on top, with A&M seeking to keep pace this Saturday against a freefalling Ole Miss squad that defeated Alabama earlier this year and then went to pieces. Mississippi State, a contender a year ago, is no longer able to put up a fight; Arkansas got hot and then burned up in the rubber fire of its coach's beefy bravado; and Auburn is mired in a vexing rebuilding year that feels like Gus Malzahn's version of an 1980s Bob Dylan album. The great challenge of surviving college football's most competitive division is one of longevity in the course of a season. Only one coach has figured it out year after year, and it has not been Kevin Sumlin, who since arriving in College Station is 1-6 against ranked teams at home.

This is not to say that it couldn't still happen for A&M. Hell, it could still happen this year, if the Aggies manage to pull themselves together this weekend on the road against Ole Miss. If they do, four eminently winnable games follow—against South Carolina, Auburn, Western Carolina, and Vanderbilt—and then the season concludes with a game against LSU that could theoretically become a playoff elimination contest. The Aggies' gifted quarterback, Kyle Allen, is not the first passer to struggle against an Alabama defense, and he is only a sophomore. The Aggies are still working to incorporate more of a power running game under new offensive line coach Dave Christensen, and their defense is largely improved under defensive coordinator John Chavis, a highly respected coach Sumlin stole away from LSU. There is still a chance, but this is now the biggest test of Sumlin's still-young career: Can he forestall a collapse like the one his team suffered last year?

"Our message is going to remain consistent," Sumlin said this week. "We lost one football game. We have the same record in the West as the one we lost to."

Still, what does it say about the team A&M lost to that no one can seem to vanquish them, even in a down year? What does it say that Alabama quarterback Jake Coker has become steadily more consistent since the loss to Ole Miss, and that the Crimson Tide continue to win while utilizing the most predictable old-school methods? Against A&M, the Tide's bruising tailback, Derrick Henry, carried 32 times for 236 yards. Maybe what that says, in the end, is that college football's most potent division in its most potent conference is still defined, three years later, by the old-fashioned play that Manziel attempted to strip away. In the end, the SEC West could come down, as it ultimately did in 2012, to LSU versus Alabama on November 7, to a brutal back-and-forth between the conference's two most overtly physical programs.

Maybe A&M hasn't reached that level yet. Maybe the Aggies can get there eventually, but with each high-profile failure, the questions arise as to whether they'll ever be able to live up to the shining promise of that first Manziel miracle. In the SEC West's ongoing battle of attrition, the Aggies have yet to prove that they can stand up to the rigors of a full season.

"What we have to do as a team is acknowledge what happened tonight, be truthful with where we are as a team and what we can get fixed," Sumlin said last Saturday. "We lean on each other, put this one away and move on with the rest of the season."

Beat Ole Miss, and the opportunity remains; beat Ole Miss, and the path is laid out for A&M to prove that it can pull together the way Alabama has in recent years, sloughing off a lone defeat and recalibrating its perspective. But another loss, and A&M's season could easily slide into oblivion. Another loss, and the notion that the paradigm can be changed recedes further into the past.