COLLEGE STATION, Texas — The sky isn’t falling on Alabama just yet. Despite Saturday’s 41-38 loss to Texas A&M, the Crimson Tide still controls its destiny moving forward.

Alabama (5-1, 2-1 in the SEC) still sits atop the SEC West standings. Unlike previous years when the Tide suffered regular-season defeats, this year’s team doesn’t have to worry about any tiebreaker scenarios as Texas A&M (4-2, 1-2) dug itself in a deep hole with two losses to open conference play.

So where does Alabama go from here?

The rest of the regular-season slate doesn’t seem so daunting. Alabama travels to Mississippi State next weekend before hosting Tennessee for “The Third Saturday in October.” From there, the Tide has an open week before welcoming a floundering LSU team followed by New Mexico State.

A home matchup against Arkansas seems more challenging now than at the beginning of the season. However, the Razorbacks have yet to beat Alabama in the Nick Saban era. After that, the only thing standing in the Tide’s way for a trip to Atlanta is a road meeting to Auburn against a Tigers team that has already had its fair share of ups and downs this season.

“We still can accomplish everything we wanna accomplish, but we’ve gotta do things better than we did tonight,” Saban said. “We’ve gotta play better. We’ve gotta be more consistent. We’ve gotta finish drives. We’ve gotta get more turnovers on defense. We’ve gotta get more stops on defense. There’s a lot of things we need to fix.”

Both halves of that statement hold a lot of credence.

Alabama is still very much in the playoff picture. The Tide will be favored to win in each of its remaining matchups. According to ESPN’s College Football Power Index, Alabama still has the third-best odds of making the playoff at 54 percent, trailing only Georgia (91.2 percent) and Oklahoma (59 percent).

Still, if Saturday’s loss to the unranked Aggies proved anything, it’s that the Tide can’t afford to take any of its opponents lightly from here on out.

“I think that everybody needs to remember how they feel and not forget it because when I talk about having respect for winning, that’s what I mean,” Saban said. “You wanna avoid the feeling that you have when you lose. So a lot of lessons to be learned out there tonight.”

Already, those lessons appear to be soaking in for Alabama players. Following the loss, starting safety Jordan Battle spoke about becoming more of a leader, stating that he will work to get his teammates on the same page moving forward.

“We didn’t practice like we usually would, and it bit us tonight,” Battle said. “We just have to be able to bring that intensity in practice up so things like this don’t happen again.”

Quarterback Bryce Young echoed those remarks, stating that he and his teammates will have a lot to learn from come film review this week.

“Individually, when the film comes on, we can see whatever mishaps we might have had and build on that,” he said. “As a team, it’s just important to respect winning, knowing what it takes, having a better process, having better intensity during the week, being more focused, more locked in. There’s a lot of stuff that we can take from this, and we’re gonna have to improve.”

Alabama’s room for error seems to be all but gone as no team has ever made the College Football Playoff with two losses. However, this isn’t a new position when it comes to the Tide’s previous pursuit of titles.

Alabama lost in the regular season in 2011, 2012, 2015 and 2017 before going on to win the national championship. Each of those teams faced the same crossroads the Tide sits out now only to learn from their mistakes and grow stronger.

Starting this week, we’ll see if this year’s team is cut from the same mold.

“If you’ve got a great sense of purpose in what you wanna accomplish and you wanna do, usually you create pretty good habits to do it because it’s important to you,” Saban said. “And I think when the game comes, everybody wants to win, but we need to do things better to get ready to play better, especially when we’re playing on the road, especially when we’re playing against really good teams.

“And I don’t know of anybody in our division that’s not a really good team. So if we don’t play really well, we’ll struggle against anybody we play against.”