October’s biggest event in college football might not end up being a win or a loss. It could be when Alabama QB Tua Tagovailoa rolled his ankle against Tennessee.

He’ll miss the game against Arkansas, in which Bama is a five-TD favorite anyway. After that, the Tide have a bye week. And then LSU comes to town.

Under Tua, Bama has arguably the best offense in the country. He adeptly gets the ball to the best receiving corps in the nation. He has 2,166 passing yards on just 194 attempts (10.5/attempt), a 75% completion rate, and a 27 to two TD/INT ratio. He is on pace to smash records, and before the injury, was the odds-on favorite for the Heisman.

Simply, he was the best player in college football through a half season. And now he could miss the game against LSU. 

Alabama was expected to be a favorite of slightly more than a touchdown, according to the Westgate Sportsbook and Casino in Las Vegas. With Tua out, if current power ratings hold, the game would essentially be a pick’ em.

Alabama is obviously concerned, and Tagovailoa had surgery on Sunday. Interestingly, this is the same procedure he underwent last year, only to his other ankle. At Monday's presser, Nick Saban offered some specifics.

“There’s no real timetable for his return, but the expectation is he will be non-weight bearing for several days and then he’ll be able to come back as his rehab allows him. So, we’re hopeful that, in a 10-day period, he’ll be back being able to do pretty active-type rehab, and we’ll see how it goes from there.”

There’s a chance Tagovailoa misses LSU or is limited. So what happens if Alabama loses against the Tigers?

Bama’s Playoff chances would take a huge hit, right? Maybe not. There’s a technicality to keep in mind.

Take a look at the CFB Playoff committee’s guiding principles, which have been the same since 2014. Some are nebulous as all get-out, but the committee intends to use them in order to separate teams that otherwise appear to be of equal quality. Five are listed, in no order of importance:

See that last one? 

“Other relevant factors such as key injuries that may have affected a team’s performance during the season or will will likely affect its postseason performance.”

I would say that not having the best player in college football, or not having him close to full health, would be a “key injury” that would “affect a team’s performance.” In December, the committee could point to its principles and note Alabama was far from full strength against LSU, then judge the Tide more by the games in which Tua was healthy.

If ever there were a case to publicly test this principle, it would be this one.

To our knowledge, it’s likely never been used in a case as prominent as this one would be. If it has, the committee’s never publicly announced it as a major factor in a Playoff seeding decision.

It’s not without precedent for tournaments to consider the effects of key injuries. In 2000, Cincinnati’s Kenyon Martin, then arguably college basketball’s best player, was injured during a conference tournament game, so the Bearcats fell to a #2 seed in the national tournament.

“We talked about Cincinnati very early and came back to them a couple times,” Craig Thompson, chairman of the selection committee, said. “But when you lose a potential player of the year, that’s going to affect your team.”

But even in that example, we don’t see a star player’s injury being used by a committee to mitigate a loss.

We've seen an SEC non-champ jump a two-loss Power 5 champ before. There now might be a scenario in which a second SEC team jumps a one-loss P5 champ.

Let’s say:

1. Alabama loses to LSU by single digits without Tua, or with a very gimpy one.
2. LSU goes on to win the SEC with an undefeated record.
3. Meanwhile, the other conference champions include one-loss Oregon and one-loss Oklahoma.
4. And Alabama, with a healthy Tagovailoa, bounces back to convincingly win at Auburn, giving the Tide a better result against Auburn than Oregon had. (Head-to-head comparisons are also on the comittee's list of factors to use when teams are otherwise comparable.)

Could the committee really put the non-SEC-champ Tide in over potentil one-loss Sooners or Ducks? It was already possible, though perhaps not likely. With this principle, in this situation, it could be even more possible. 

The Tide will surely rank in the top four (perhaps quite comfortably so) in the CFP’s initial rankings on November 5, demonstrating the committee already thought of this as a Playoff-grade team with a healthy Tua. And remember, the stated goal of the committee is to select the “four best teams.” With a healthy Tagovailoa, the Tide are likely one of the four best, even if they lose a game without his full talents.

Picking Bama over a one-loss champ would be extremely controversial, even though the rule has been on the books for years, and this could be a reasonable use of it.

It would aggravate people who’ve seen Alabama get in controversially (though probably fairly) before. Remember in 2017, Alabama did not win its own division, then got in over two-loss Big Ten champ Ohio State. Alabama, of course, would win the title. The committee's preference for conference champions is clearly not meant to be taken as an ironclad requirement​ for all Playoff entrants.

In 2011, LSU beat Bama in Tuscaloosa, then faced a rematch that infuriated so many people, it helped end the BCS. Eight years later, we could get the same rematch, this time due not to weekly polls, but to a principle written down in 2014.

(And if Bama beats LSU at home in November anyway, don’t expect the Tigers to leave the Playoff conversation either, with or without injury adjustments. There’s a decent chance LSU will be the committee’s #1 team entering that game, meaning they might not fall far. No matter what, college football fans might be talking about LSU-Bama 2019 for quite some time.)