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Alabama has seen its hopes of making the College Football Playoff take a major hit since October rolled around, and former Crimson Tide quarterback AJ McCarron pointed the finger at TikTok while trying to explain why the team has found itself trending in the wrong direction.
The Alabama Crimson Tide knew they were going to be facing some challenges after Nick Saban brought his time with the program to an end following the conclusion of his 17th season in Tuscaloosa, but it looked like Kalen DeBoer had managed to pick up where he left off following a 5-0 start that included a win over #2 Georgia.
However, the team suffered a pretty stunning setback when it lost to Vanderbilt for the first time in 40 years, and while the Crimson Tide were able to bounce back with a win over South Carolina, they dropped to 5-2 (and plummeted to the 15th spot in the AP Poll) with a 24-17 loss to Tennessee last weekend.
As things currently stand, ESPN‘s model estimates Alabama has a 44% chance of making the College Football Playoff, and they’ll almost certainly need to win all of their last five remaining games if they want to end up among the 12 teams who eventually make the cut.
Why has Alabama failed to live up to the (admittedly lofty) expectations fans have for the team? There are plenty of factors you could point to, and AJ McCarron identified two major culprits while discussing the woes of his former team on a recent installment of the McCready & Siskey podcast.
The QB who won three national championships while playing under Saban at Alabama called attention to two fairly recent developments he implied are intrinsically linked, saying:
“It’s definitely a different era. I don’t think you’ll see the same standard from discipline— just things that the team seems to do. It’s a new day and age.
Everybody’s worried about f–king TikTok and having a reel and being on highlights for their personal self and personal gain, and how much money they can get from NIL. We just didn’t have that s–t back then.
It was a team sport. You came together as a team because you had one common goal: because you knew that’s how you were going to make your money, was by winning.”
It’s easy to argue McCarron is going into “Old Man Yells At Cloud” Mode here, but I think he makes some fairly valid points. It would be foolish to suggest social media is the biggest reason Alabama hasn’t been able to get things firing on all cylinders, but it probably isn’t helping in the grand scheme of things.