On one of those college football weekends with too much of too much, No. 1 Alabama will visit No. 3 LSU in the annual clash of large lads right after No. 6 Georgia visits No. 9 Kentucky in a fresh doozy, with Saban such a towering Rushmore figure that he turns up in the plot of all four combatants, even if in one case the appearance was fleeting but telling.

He coaches Alabama (well). He used to coach LSU (well). His influence over Georgia looks obvious. He’s a curious part of Kentucky’s history.

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He’s such a big platelet in the bloodstream of Alabama-LSU that he has bent its recent trajectory as his bent in discussing it has become predictable: It seemed obvious he might start this week by casting Alabama’s seven straight wins over LSU as irrelevant, and he started this week by casting Alabama’s seven straight wins over LSU as irrelevant.

“Our record or any other statistic that you guys want to sort of bring up about all this game and all that will not affect the outcome of this game at all,” he said in Tuscaloosa as if some imperious inner clock told him to do so.

His dominant team has played defenses ranked, in yards per play, Nos. 110, 108, 109, 100, 120, 94, 90 and 98 — playing Alabama did not help those rankings, of course — while LSU ranks 23rd. And considering Alabama scores 54.1 points per game while LSU allows 15.1 and considering quarterback Tua Tagovailoa’s touchdowns-to-interceptions ratio (25-0) is itself an impossible football sonnet, it’s all about whether LSU can match the Saban standard.

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“But, you know, we have some good defensive backs,” LSU Coach Ed Orgeron said. “We lead the country in interceptions [14, in a tie with Fresno State and Maryland ]. I think we match up well with them.”

LSU seeks this standard knowing Saban began learning to set it with his 48-16 run at LSU from 2000 to 2004, including the 2003 national championship, which means the SEC began its long tilt toward Sabanistan on Tuesday, Nov. 30, 1999, when LSU hired him from Michigan State, and he began learning the league as he noted this week.

With the league learned by 2015, his Alabama team would make one of its occasional trips to Athens, Ga., stomp to a 24-3 halftime lead and win, 38-10. That game shouted that while Georgia was generally very good, it lacked whatever extra notch Alabama had, a notch it has obtained since.

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Participating in a 2010s fashion trend two months later, Georgia hired a nine-year Saban assistant, Kirby Smart, who had the handy credential of also having played for Georgia. Through its 21 wins in its past 24 games, it has called to mind Saban more than once in the way it goes about its business and moves around on defense. That makes it an ideal visitor to assist with Kentucky’s newfound self-measurement.

Around Lexington, fans have had themselves a giddy autumn after spending decades honing the fine art of sensing doom prowling just around the corner. On a team that has not lost in regulation, they have watched a marvel of a defense allow only one team (Central Michigan) 20 points in regulation. More appealingly, they have seen their team (7-1) win the kind of games it used to botch as if some ancient curse that appeared from some ancient tomb has up and expired.

Kentucky led Florida 21-10 in the fourth quarter on Sept. 8 the same way it led it 27-14 last year, but instead of losing inevitably, it spent the dreaded last play getting Josh Allen’s sack and Davonte Robinson’s 30-yard fumble return. It trailed Missouri 14-3 with six minutes left last week but won 15-14 on a punt return and a closing, eight-play, 81-yard drive remarkable for its inclusion of two sacks, the inexorable crushers Kentucky fans have come to expect. Even in the 20-14 overtime loss at Texas A&M, the Wildcats made a play that forged the kind of break seldom found in their history: Derrick Baity’s strip, a skittering football and Darius West’s 40-yard fumble return for a tying touchdown.

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Running back Benny Snell Jr., one of those youths for whom attention is not a burden, wrote in the Players Tribune about how he got curious in Missouri about the reaction in Lexington, thus checked Twitter. “I couldn’t believe my eyes,” he wrote. “It was just tons of kids in the middle of State Street. Everyone’s jumping and dancing and yelling. All for . . . a football win. In Lexington. Incredible.”

Tons of kids couldn’t remember the ways in which Kentucky became arguably the nation’s leading football harbor of strange excruciation. It has lost when Tulane went 87 yards in 12 seconds on two interference penalties that arranged a field goal, when Kentucky ran four plays from the 5-yard line at Tennessee (all runs by one back, Mark Higgs), when Florida threw a 28-yard touchdown pass to a wide-open receiver with three seconds left, when a linebacker made a Peach Bowl-clinching interception, then ran and fumbled it.

All those things formed an expectation of same, lodged in the minds of witnesses through such admirable downers as the 52-50 overtime loss to Tennessee in 2007 or the 36-30 overtime loss to Florida in 2014, a high pile of glumness that magnifies what Kentucky accomplishes now. Yet it all found an epitome Nov. 9, 2002, which might well remain the only game in which a coach got a Gatorade shower, then lost.

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As Kentucky fans edged toward storming the field and its athletic director gave congratulatory handshakes (understandably), LSU’s 75-yard touchdown pass from Marcus Randall to Devery Henderson with two seconds left became one of the weirdest endings in college football history. Three Kentucky players touched the ball along its way. It descended around the 25-yard line and got collected at the 18, yet Henderson still scored.

Wrote Jim Kleinpeter in the New Orleans Times-Picayune: “A play that never works for LSU in practice, one the Tigers ran incorrectly Saturday, might go down as the most astounding in the school’s 110-year football history.” In the Sunday Advocate of Baton Rouge, Scott Rabalais told of two Kentucky fans standing on the crossbar ready for goal-post toppling, when one said to the other, “Did we just lose this game?”

Now let’s turn for comment to the winning coach from that telltale game, who had just seen a daydream play yet managed to say with hilarious dullness, “We always say we need to play 60 minutes. There is the reason why.”

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Yeah, that was Saban.