There is something to be said for surviving any given Saturday in this year’s Southeastern Conference.

There’s something to be said for taking an opponent’s best punch, finding yourself in a fourth-quarter fight and discovering that, when the outcome is still in doubt, there is enough left in the tank to deliver a few punches of your own.

Alabama did that against Texas A&M on Saturday, and Kalen DeBoer deserves credit for it.

It wasn’t always pretty. SEC football seldom is, particularly when October begins giving way to November. There are no style points awarded for surviving an SEC Saturday, no additional consideration given for artistic merit.

There is only the final score, the standings and the knowledge that another opponent is waiting.

The Crimson Tide earned the right to enjoy its victory over the Aggies. In a game that demanded a response, Alabama found one, rising in the fourth quarter to impose its will and finish off a talented opponent.

That matters, particularly in a conference where even teams struggling to find their footing are capable of ruining someone else’s season. In this new world of college football, with NIL and the transfer portal reshaping rosters, domination no longer seems a reasonable expectation every Saturday.

But there is a difference between winning a difficult game against a reeling Texas A&M team and proving you can win a championship.

For DeBoer, that distinction has become the defining question of this Alabama season and his tenure.

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With two losses already on the ledger, the Crimson Tide has little margin for another afternoon of inconsistency. The clearest road to a national championship is to win every game from here on out.

And the road runs through Baton Rouge.

Judging by the commercials on my TV, we are deep into political season. A familiar piece of political advice applies rather neatly to college football:

“If you don’t like what’s being said, change the conversation.”

DeBoer and his staff have certainly heard the conversation over the last week. They would have to live in considerable isolation to have missed it. The questions about consistency, preparation and whether DeBoer’s particular approach to football is suited to the demands of the Southeastern Conference have followed him into his third season in Tuscaloosa.

There is no better opportunity to answer those questions than on November 7 at Tiger Stadium, with Lane Kiffin standing on the opposite sideline.

If DeBoer thought Knoxville was a difficult environment, Baton Rouge is unlikely to offer much relief. The intensity will be every bit as palpable as the bourbon.

DeBoer knows the setting. He won there two years ago under circumstances that were not entirely dissimilar. Alabama’s thrashing of LSU that night offered early hope that his program was finding its footing in the SEC.

But this is not the LSU team he encountered then.

Brian Kelly is gone, and these Tigers have considerably sharper teeth.

LSU did not go to extraordinary lengths to bring Kiffin to Louisiana merely to win games that previous coaches might have won. The Tigers made an enormous investment in a coach they believed could deliver championships, then gave him the resources to assemble a team capable of winning precisely this sort of game. It’s also why Kiffin left Oxford for Baton Rouge.

Everyone in the SEC wants to beat Alabama. That has been true for generations, and it will remain true long after the current collection of coaches has moved on.

But nobody on LSU’s sideline will have more personal reasons to want this one than Kiffin.

There is history there. Considerable history. It hardly needs repeating for anyone who has followed Alabama football over the last decade.

Kiffin knows what Alabama means. More importantly, he knows what beating Alabama means, even if that particular accomplishment has eluded him as a head coach.

He also knows that when his former boss retired, his name was conspicuously absent from the public conversation surrounding potential replacements.

Now he has an opportunity to defeat the man who got the job and, in the process, drive a stake into the heart of Alabama’s playoff ambitions.

One suspects he would find considerable satisfaction in both. There’s nothing Lane Kiffin loves more than causing chaos for a former employer.

On the other hand, beating Kiffin on his own field and potentially relegating him to a secondary bowl game in Orlando or Tampa would be quite satisfying for many Tide fans.

As Mike DuBose would say, this game is certainly a tremendous opportunity and a tremendous challenge.

The open date this weekend offers time to heal and prepare, but not time to escape the questions that have followed this team and this coaching staff.

Many Crimson Tide teams have entered Tiger Stadium with championship aspirations on the line and left with those aspirations still intact. For DeBoer, a victory would provide an answer more convincing than anything he could say at a press conference. Winning a game of this magnitude, in that environment, against that opponent, would change the conversation.

Lose, and the conversation will become deafening.

The legacies of Alabama coaches have rarely been written during the season’s first two months. They are written in November, when the stakes become unmistakable, the opponents become less forgiving and the difference between a good season and a memorable one begins to reveal itself.

Survival is not the ultimate ambition in Tuscaloosa. Championships are.

Kalen DeBoer has heard what people are saying. In two weeks, he will have a tremendous opportunity to change the conversation.

John Longshore is the co-host of Longshore & McKnight on Yellowhammer News.