Alabama football and Nick Saban were the hunted. How will they adapt to being hunters? | Opinion

They’re leaving.

The 2021 Heisman Trophy winner. The pass rusher quarterbacks feared. The offensive weapon. The nickelback cog in the secondary. A veteran of the offensive line.

They’re NFL bound.

Several other, less accomplished, Alabama players will head to the pros, too. Others packed their bags for the transfer portal.

And the worst part for Alabama is not that it must bid farewell to so many starters from 2022. Bryce Young and Will Anderson Jr. aside, this team did not rank among Nick Saban's deepest or most talented. The Crimson Tide has endured more notable exoduses during Saban’s dynastic tenure and come out the other side just fine.

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The worst part is, in a twist uncommon to Alabama, the heirs apparent are not, well, apparent.

How confident are you that an Alabama quarterback is ready to seize the reins in the way Young did from Mac Jones, or that a running back the caliber of Derrick Henry is ready to break out?

I’m not saying Alabama is approaching dark days. The Tide inked the nation's No. 1 recruiting class, a group that features 15 of the nation's top 100 prospects. So, no, Alabama is not teetering on the abyss.

I am saying Alabama will find itself in unfamiliar terrain in 2023: The Tide profiles as more like the hunter, not the hunted. Not since the beginning of Saban’s tenure has that been the case.

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Of the many remarkable attributes of Saban's reign, I consider the Tide’s unrelenting staying power to be chief among them.

Consider, Alabama's 2020 national championship squad ranked among the most impressive teams in college football history. Ten Alabama players were selected in the following NFL Draft, six of which went in the first round.

And still we expected the Tide to endure as it tends to, to remain on top. And we had reason to believe it would, because players like Young and Anderson stood ready for their star turn. Alabama opened 2021 ranked No. 1 and may well have repeated as national champions if not for injuries to wide receivers Jameson Williams and John Metchie III, which left the Tide playing in a straitjacket against Georgia in the national championship. Still, that team won the SEC and finished as a national runner-up. Georgia seized the crown, but Alabama remained the hunted entering this season.

It is a rite of the offseason for the media to predict Alabama to win the SEC West and usually the conference as a whole. Not since 2012 have sportswriters who cover the conference predicted that the SEC West would be ruled by something other than the script A. LSU was tapped as division favorite that year. Alabama won the conference and the national championship.

Don't pick against the Tide became the rule.

Alabama has opened the season ranked No. 1 in the AP poll five times in the past seven years, but any expectation of such a ranking to begin 2023 is based on the program's history and its coach rather than a reflection of the depth chart.

Saban’s six national championships at Alabama are a testament to the Tide’s quality depth as much as to its stars. We expected Alabama to continue threshing because we saw a talented cast of reserves who would start at almost any other program.

Alabama lacked such depth this season, one reason why it did not qualify for the College Football Playoff for just the second time in the CFP’s nine-year history.

Alabama’s 11 wins were foremost a testament to Young’s brilliance rather than an army of all-stars.

If I were forced to cast my preseason ballot today, I’d vote LSU to repeat as winner of the SEC West. The Tigers are armed with stars like linebacker Harold Perkins, wide receiver Malik Nabers and tight end Mason Taylor, and they return not one but two quarterbacks who are more proven than any on Alabama’s roster.

Of course, January predictions are more of a fool’s errand than ever thanks to the rate of player movement and how transfers affect the product.

Alabama is playing catchup in the portal party to the programs like Georgia and LSU. The Bulldogs plundered two of the SEC’s top wide receivers, Dominic Lovett of Missouri and Rara Thomas of Mississippi State. Brian Kelly remains an active acquisitionist, and LSU paces the SEC's transfer haul in terms of quantity.

After the NCAA in 2021 changed its rules to grant immediate eligibility for transfers, Saban pledged that Alabama would “be selective in how we choose” transfers, and he cautioned that the transfer portal would include a lot of “bad players (leaving) good teams, because they’re not playing.” He predicted Alabama would not lose its stars.

"I don’t think our good players are going to be leaving," Saban said then, "but I think we’ll be able to get some good players to join us."

While Alabama uses transfers to accessorize its roster, recruiting high school talent remains the program's backbone, and, on the trail, Alabama remains an unrelenting force.

Still, the flow of outbound transfers affects Alabama’s ability to stockpile depth, and Saban also has been disproven about not losing “good players” to the portal.

To wit, linebacker Drew Sanders transferred last offseason and became a first-team All-SEC performer at Arkansas.

So, I wouldn’t be quick to say Alabama won’t miss any of the several players who transferred to top-25 programs already this winter. Some of those players could have developed into bigger roles at Alabama in 2023 and plugged holes.

As it is, Alabama enters an uncertain offseason, a fork in the road and likely a 2023 season marked by a reduction in hype. That may come with a silver lining.

Saban spoke in November about how this team felt an unyielding pressure to deliver an outcome that matched lofty expectations.

"This team put a lot of pressure on themselves, and they wanted to do really, really well," Saban said after Alabama had suffered its second loss. "They had very high goals and expectations.

"When you have high expectations and you become outcome-oriented … I don’t want our players to be that way.

"I don’t want our team to ever be that way, because we’re very process-oriented."

Next season looks to be a process. A possible rebuilding year, even, to the extent such a thing can exist under Saban.

As Young, Anderson and others march to the pros, questions abound on whether a next wave of talent is prepared to meet this moment.

Now, Saban holds the spear, and Alabama is the hunter trying to chase down Georgia and LSU.

Blake Toppmeyer is an SEC Columnist for the USA TODAY Network. Email him at BToppmeyer@gannett.com and follow him on Twitter @btoppmeyer.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY NETWORK: Nick Saban, Alabama football chasing LSU for SEC West title in 2023