Washington, what matters most is what you do after you lose to Alabama

Here’s where you stand after testing yourself against the best.

You are the Washington Huskies football team. It’s weird, I know. You’re now easily over 100 people, and that’s a hard thing to comprehend. Work with me.

You’re a whole football team, and you just got finished losing, 24-7, to Alabama.

You feel very bad right now. Alabama defensive lineman/racing bulldozer Jonathan Allen chased you and buried you every time you tried to block him. Receptions of the ball — when they even happened — ended with two or three well-positioned, well-coached, and superbly conditioned players meeting you at the ball. They did not arrive slowly, both because they are fast and because they did not eat a full truckload of Chick-fil-A at the team hotel this week. (Half the usual order, because of “concerns” about the Tide eating that much fried food prior to the game.)

You, the entire Huskies team, tried to tackle running back Bo Scarbrough.

You did try. There’s film of it and everything. You didn’t do it, of course. Scarbrough ran for 184 yards on just 19 carries, scored twice, and effectively ended the game by a.) running out of his own endzone on third down to move the chains, and b.) crosscutting the Washington defense on the longest touchdown rush in Alabama bowl history, a demoralizing 68-yarder.

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Scarbrough runs with Derrick Henry’s power and Kenyan Drake’s ability to blow through holes before defenders even read the blocks. Nick Saban now orders combinations of former players from a lab and creates custom hybrids. The next running back will have Scarbrough DNA in his coding; Alabama will be one step closer to offensive perfection. This is The Process, and it works whether Lane Kiffin decides to make bizarre calls down the stretch on his way out the door to the Florida Atlantic job or not.*

* Kiffin did call one of your own plays against you, Washington, that toss sweep fake with an option keeper. He has a sense of humor, and that’s probably why he’ll be coaching at Florida Atlantic next year.

You’re hurt, and you’re also hurt, Washington. You won your first Pac-12 title since 2000. You walloped a good swath of your schedule, including a 70-21 flattening of Oregon, your first win over the Ducks since 2003. You demolished your state-rival Cougars. Sophomore Jake Browning emerged as one of the best quarterbacks in the country, wideout John Ross tore up Pac-12 defenses with breathtaking ease, and Psalm Wooching and Budda Baker played hyperactive, downhill-attacking defense all year long.

It was great, but you knew that, because you’re the Washington football team here. You know yourself pretty well. You also know that you got to the national title picture way, way ahead of schedule, hitting the Playoff in year three of the Chris Petersen administration.

That’s not bad! It’s a sign you’re talented. In fact, it’s a sign you’re so talented that your fast-track promotion pitted you against not only the best-engineered power in college football this year, but the most dominant power of the last decade.

And this has been written before, but this time it starred you, and that makes all the difference.

Boy, has all of this has been written before, and so many times, and in the same tedious way every time. The plotline rarely changes. Alabama won a football game with a brutal defense and a dominant run game. Nothing happened once the Tide got a 10-point lead. That’s what’s supposed to happen when Alabama gets a 10-point lead: nothingness, despair, and a brutal boredom.

Photo by Streeter Lecka/Getty Images

Even their players were larger. You saw that, along with everyone else, when Alabama’s defensive line got into a three-point stance. Their haunches were bigger, man. A team can’t lose when it has the decided haunches advantage.

You also can’t win when the other team has been at this for years of extremely focused recruiting. You know this, because when Allen needed a break, former five-star Da’Shawn Hand stepped into make your life hell. You can’t win when the staff on the other side is so big and so deep that it allegedly pulled video of all of your coach’s trick plays for the last eight years. There are at least five former head coaches on staff in one capacity or another, amid the sea of consultants, graduate assistants, quality control coordinators, trainers, and other support staff.

You can get all of this in time. Time is a thing most college football teams act like they don’t have. This has already been a long, long time coming. Bama got higher than you on the mountain by starting a full decade before you, when Tyrone Willingham was flying your program straight into the side of Mount Rainier. And look at you now, leaving Atlanta bruised and battered but with a clear understanding of where you’re at as a program. You’re a top-10 program now.

You don’t need pep talks right now, though.

You also don’t need to do what other programs have done when, having been outpaced by Alabama, in the wake of that defeat.

The SEC, by and large, responded to Saban in the dumbest way possible. Other schools hired his underlings, assuming Saban was running some kind of replicable football management academy. (The mixed results from that effort show he was not, and that if you want Saban football, you should probably hire Saban.)

You need to remember that some schools, when faced with the challenge of Alabama’s presence, simply chose to keep doing the things they know they are good at. Clemson’s model is based on relentless recruiting and hiring talented assistants to work around Dabo Swinney’s CEO-cheerleading role. At no point has Clemson panicked or changed what works for them. They play Alabama in the championship again after coming within one possession of outright beating them last year.

More of what you do well, done with patience: that’s how you chip away at a superpower. It’s a long process, humbling process, but it’s something Petersen seemed to acknowledge in his postgame presser.

Along those lines, you know, we also talked about the bar has been moved in that locker room, and they get that. So they got a taste of it. And so that's awesome, and so I think that can change your mindset. But it's not like we — when we go back to work, we're the same team. So it's a balance between knowing that they can do some special things if we kind of go back to our humble roots of starting over.

Talking about starting over, work, and humility just minutes after a conference championship and a trip to the Playoff is definitely the way to go. It may also be the one definite thing besides recruiting good players you can take from Alabama’s plan. This sounds like Saban after every game, including any of his national title games.

You also don’t need to remember the last image.

The Georgia Dome’s last-ever college football game came a day before its last-ever regular season NFL game. With celebratory confetti from Alabama’s trophy presentation still on the field, the stadium crew needed to flip the field for the Falcons game on Sunday.

Looking down from the press box, the last thing I saw were the workers at the Dome powerwashing “WASHINGTON” out of the end zone with a quickness. Either way, they blast your name off the field at the end.