Four Downs: The fall of Alabama didn't start with Kalen DeBoer. It began last season

It was a wild and unpredictable Week 8 in college football. Matt Hayes analyzes four hot topics from Saturday's games.

First Down: The fall of Alabama

Let’s look at this thing globally, instead of staring directly at the heat of the moment.

The fall of Alabama began last season -- not in Saturday's loss to Tennessee.

But for an unthinkable fourth-and-31 conversion on the last play of the Auburn game, Alabama wouldn’t have made last year’s College Football Playoff — even with the win over Georgia in the SEC championship game.

That near loss to Auburn, and the near revolt within the locker room earlier in the year after legendary longtime coach Nick Saban benched quarterback Jalen Milroe, showed a team that had gone astray from its Saban-led-and-fed roots and was winning games on pure talent.

Once Saban retired at the end of last season — in no small part because of the sudden power and movement players had gained in the sport — the last remaining restraints to a player-led-and-fed team were broken. Now here we are.

Alabama gave up 40 points in an unthinkable loss to a Vanderbilt team that doesn’t have one player who could start for the Tide. A week later, Alabama should’ve lost at home to a South Carolina team with a limited offense led by a struggling freshman quarterback.

Then came the Third Saturday in October, and frankly, it shouldn’t have been a last-possession game. Tennessee left numerous points on the field in a 24-17 win, quarterback Nico Iamaleava missing open receivers in the Alabama secondary – on all three levels – over and over.

If Iamaleava were more accurate (he was 14-of-27, for 194 yards), the Vols would’ve scored 40, too.

Somehow Alabama has saved its best for two games against the best team in college football, beating Georgia in the 2023 SEC championship tame, and racing to a big lead in the first half of the Georgia game late last month, and holding on for another win over the Dawgs.

Other than that: a whole lot of ugly.

This isn’t to say new Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer won’t win, and eventually win big, in Tuscaloosa. It just means that this season of transition will be more about finding which players are committed to moving forward and being led by DeBoer.

And which are moving forward and looking toward something else.

HIGHS AND LOWS: Alabama's loss to Tennessee leads Week 8 winners and losers

Second Down: Indiana is a football school

The danger is checking off wins along the fortunate road to the unthinkable. But at this point, how could you not?

It’s time to start taking unbeaten Indiana as a serious threat for the College Football Playoff. Yes, the Hoosiers — the Big Ten’s perpetual tomato can.

If the cake future schedule doesn’t do it for you, Saturday afternoon’s 56-7 clobbering of Nebraska should.

“I’m not going to let (players) get complacent. Or the coaches,” first-year Indiana coach Curt Cignetti said after Nebraska’s second-worst loss since joining the Big Ten in 2011 “I was a maniac in the fourth quarter of this game. A maniac.”

This, everyone, is Indiana football. A coach who has won everywhere he has coached now changing the fortunes of the Big Ten’s worst program of the last three decades.

Cignetti took 12 transfers from James Madison (where he won 11 games in 2023), and 19 others from the portal and has reshaped a roster void of talent. The top four rushers are transfers, four of its top five receivers are transfers, and its top pass rusher is a transfer.

The total transition numbers: 34 into the portal, 31 from the portal — including quarterback Kurtis Rourke, who played five seasons at Ohio before arriving in Bloomington. He’s completing 73.8% of his passes, is averaging 10.9 yards per attempt and has a 192.1 passer rating — all career highs.

Rourke has 14 TDs and 2 INTs, and Indiana (7-0) is unbeaten this late in the season for the first time since the 1960s. But it gets better.

The Hoosiers will be favored in every game but one over the second half of the season, and the one in question (Nov. 23) at Ohio State could be a CFP watermark. Win, or play well in a loss, and the Hoosiers are in the playoff.

AMAZING DAY: Missouri QB Brady Cook goes from hospital to defeating Auburn

Third Down: Miami is a CFP lock

Miami gave up 45 points to Louisville Saturday, and still cleared its last realistic hurdle to reaching the CFP.

The 52-45 road win moved the Canes to 7-0, and the remaining regular season schedule is softer than Louisville’s defense: Florida State, Duke, at Georgia Tech, Wake Forest, at Syracuse.

Unless something wildly unexpected happens, Miami will reach the ACC championship game unbeaten and will have already locked up a spot in the CFP — win or lose.

But there is some drama left in the Miami regular season: can quarterback Cam Ward do enough against the easy-lift schedule to win the Heisman Trophy?

Can he do enough to overshadow Boise State running back Ashton Jeanty’s chase of the NCAA single-season rushing record (Jeanty needs 1,381 to break it), or Oregon quarterback Dillon Gabriel’s chase for the NCAA career passing touchdowns record (Gabriel needs 16 to break it)?

Fourth Down: USC and Riley are married for better or worse

USC found another way to blow a game Saturday, and now there’s no avoiding it.

It’s about to get all kinds of ugly in Troy. And there’s too much money invested in coach Lincoln Riley to do anything but take it.

USC has lost three in a row and four of five, including two losses to Big Ten middlings Minnesota and Maryland, and a loss to the worst Michigan team since pre-Jim Harbaugh.

USC has lost nine of its last 14 games under Riley, and is in danger of missing the postseason. Now, the gut punch: Riley isn’t going anywhere.

He signed a reported 10-year, fully guaranteed $110 million deal with USC in 2022, and making a move this season would cost more than $70 million.

For now, there isn’t a worse look in college football: Riley earning $10 million-plus per season to lose to Minnesota and Maryland — and maybe more Big Ten middlings down the road (Rutgers, Washington, Nebraska, UCLA).

Matt Hayes is the senior national college football writer for USA TODAY Sports Network. Follow him on X @MattHayesCFB.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Alabama fall isn't Kalen DeBoer issue. It began under Nick Saban