The criticism has come in waves. He looks heavy. He’s injury-prone. His best stats were produced against lesser competition. His weaknesses were exposed against the strongest defenses. The style with which he plays is risky.

Tua Tagovailoa has heard it all in recent months, absorbing the slings and arrows one year after experiencing outrageous fortune. The junior quarterback, who spent last offseason soaking up praise in wake of his national championship game heroics against Georgia, has taken his share of hits since a crushing 44-16 defeat to Clemson on college football’s biggest stage.

That loss in early January was inarguably the nadir of his Alabama career, leading to a vivisection of Tagovailoa that has been conducted by media, fans and even his coach, Nick Saban.

“I know this sounds bad, but I am glad I had that opportunity to feel a loss like that, because what can you learn from winning?” Tagovailoa said Wednesday at SEC Media Days. “You can’t learn as much. But when you lose, you start appreciating things a lot more, definitely in a different perspective as well. I am kind of glad that we did [experience that]. Many lessons have been learned from that loss.”

It was an interesting comment from a player who once seemed infallible, who appeared dang near-perfect at times, who never gave the impression he could become the central character in a redemption story.

Upon wresting the starting job from Jalen Hurts last summer, Tagovailoa launched a Heisman Trophy campaign that brought him within a whisker of winning the sport’s greatest individual award as a sophomore. In the first six games of 2018, he completed 75 percent of his throws, tossed 18 touchdown passes and had a pristine stat line that had yet to be blemished by an interception. It was the scintillating encore to his title-game performance against the Bulldogs, when he burst on the scene, staged a remarkable comeback and won the hearts and minds of Alabama fans the world over.

But in the final stretch of 2018, a spate of different lower-body injuries and a series of top-flight defenses conspired to make Tagovailoa look all too human. Five of his six interceptions were thrown against Mississippi State, Georgia and Clemson — three teams ranked in the top 15 in total yards allowed per game.

“Towards the end of the season, we turned the ball over a little bit more offensively than what we had in the first half of the season,” Saban said. “And I’m sure that he wants to make sure that the decision making that led to some of those things are something that he can improve on.

“I think that, you know, we'd like for him to learn. Tua is a great competitor so he's going to try to make a great play every play. And sometimes those things have worked out extremely well. And other times they've led to some disasters. So having a little better judgment about when to say when can be an asset from an health standpoint as well as eliminate the negative play standpoint.”

Tagovailoa has made it his mission to correct that problem, acknowledging that “it’s whatever the defense gives me that I need to take.”

That realization, among others, was arrived at during an offseason of forced introspection as Tagovailoa diagnosed his flaws and aimed to correct them.

It’s been an ongoing process for the Hawaiian southpaw, whose uneven play in Alabama’s spring game invited more scrutiny and a month later prompted Saban to say, “I think he should take the perception that he has a lot to prove.”

It was a pointed message Tagovailoa has heeded. Away from the stadium lights and TV cameras, he conjured up a plan with the team’s strength and conditioning coach Scott Cochran to better preserve his body during the grind of an SEC schedule. He also concentrated on shedding pounds, dropping from 230 to an ideal weight of 215 as spring morphed into summer.

“It was very important to get back into shape,” he said. “I feel a lot healthier. It’s all about doing things the right way for Coach Saban.”

But in reality this campaign of self-improvement is about Tagovailoa, for Tagovailoa.

“I think he has grown a lot in this time period,” said teammate Dylan Moses.

Asked to elaborate, Moses continued his thought and explained, “Just being OK with criticism because me and him are alike in that sense. We are our biggest critics.”

And as fans, media as well as his own coaches have reminded him since January, there is plenty for Tagovailoa to nitpick.

The same quarterback who could do no wrong last offseason following his greatest triumph has spent the last few months simply trying to get it right after his worst setback. So it goes for Alabama’s most important player.

Rainer Sabin is an Alabama beat writer for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @RainerSabin