TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – If we’re being honest about it, Blake Sims probably should have left Alabama a long time ago. It would’ve been the smart play, the easy play, especially in a program like this where the stars usually show who they are right away or are never heard from again.

If Sims had been rational about it, he’d have seen his eligibility wasting away while Nick Saban scoured the country to bring in someone better, seen that the reward for four hard, unglamorous years in the program was Alabama’s fan base holding up a backup off Florida State’s roster as the post-AJ McCarron savior.

Instead, he saw himself getting one shot to win an Iron Bowl; somehow, some way, even if almost nobody else did. And when it was over, as Sims jumped on top of the fence in front of Alabama’s student section to celebrate a 55-44 victory against No. 16 Auburn, the loyalty he had shown the program was finally repaid.

GAME REPORT: Alabama tops Auburn in Iron Bowl

Because on the night he looked the most nervous, made the costliest mistakes and almost reached the point of no return, it would have been easy for Saban to make the switch so many predicted would come all along. At that moment, with Sims having just thrown his third interception and Auburn taking a 12-point lead, it seemed like switching to Jacob Coker might have been Alabama’s best chance.

But Coker never surfaced, Sims didn’t sink, and what followed is every bit of why he stayed. To beat Auburn. To win championships. To be remembered like McCarron and Greg McElroy and all the others with their imprint on this rivalry.

“Being in the same program with those guys is great because they’re talked about very well,” Sims said. “Hopefully I can be talked about very well from what happened.”

And what happened, specifically for him, shouldn’t be lost in the frenzy of emotion and athleticism on display at Bryant-Denny Stadium.

It was a wild, whirring game with big momentum swings, incredible catches by Alabama’s Amari Cooper and Auburn’s Sammie Coates and an underlying sense that almost anything could happen on the next play. It didn’t produce the all-time dramatic finish of the 2013 Iron Bowl, but a combined 99 points and 1,169 yards made for edge-of-your seat entertainment even that game couldn’t match for four quarters.

WEEK 14: Winners and losers

At the center of it all, though, was the Sims subplot. In a span of 11 minutes, 51 seconds in the second and third quarters, he made three egregious mistakes that handed Auburn the lead and a belief it could win, the kind of mistakes that usually get you beat in a rivalry game.

They weren’t even the kind of interceptions Saban will excuse; just bad throws and bad reads, prompting a fleeting thought about whether Alabama might need to get Coker in the game.

“Blake just didn’t seem to be having his best stuff, and I talked to him about needing to respond and do a little better,” Saban said. “We really didn’t think about making a change, but if things kept going the way they were, we probably would’ve given Jake a chance.

“Blake has made a lot of plays for us, and I have a lot of confidence in Blake and I wasn’t anxious to pull the plug on him. I wanted to give him every opportunity as a senior and a leader of this team to bring this team back.”

And at this point, it’s fair to mention that coming back and self-correcting is a whole lot easier when Cooper is running through wide open spaces in the Auburn secondary and running back T.J. Yeldon can go get yards when you need them and Alabama’s roster full of five-star recruits is just better than Auburn’s. But in the end, it’s still on the quarterback to figure it out, and the fact that Sims completed nine of his next 11 passes, finished with 312 yards and scrambled for the go-ahead touchdown in the fourth quarter is something they will take great pride in around here because it is both the quintessential Alabama story and an outlier all at once.

Saban has won four national championships, none with an elite next-level quarterback. But even by those standards, Sims is an unlikely man to be guiding the Crimson Tide into the SEC Championship and perhaps the College Football Playoff. After a redshirt, a season at running back and two years of mop-up duty behind McCarron, the fact that he has fulfilled his dream as a fifth-year senior is something few on this star-studded roster can relate to but all respect. Sims’ teammates are rooting for him; not only because of what it will mean for them, but genuinely because of what this means to him and how imperfect it sometimes seems.

FOOTBALL FOUR: Rating and debating college football and the Playoff

“We’ve always been behind him when he messes up a little bit and tell him he can overcome it and play the next play,” Cooper said. “When we did it this time he believed it because we’ve been doing it all year.”

In some ways, things may get easier now for Sims – not the opponents, but the circumstances. Just by winning the Iron Bowl – this Iron Bowl, in particular – he’s validated why he won the job despite Coker being brought in to take it from him and why he’s kept it all season.

In this state, the pressure of trying to win a national title is nothing compared to that.

“I mean, I don’t really know what was going on (when Coker started warming up), but I just tried to control what I could,” Sims said. “I have great guys around me and great coaches who really don’t tell me all week what I do good. It’s all bad, but that’s good. You welcome those kind of coaches because they’re going to keep you on your p’s and q’s and when crunch time comes, you’re able to execute the right way.”

For four years, Sims hoped to find out if he could execute under that kind of pressure. Finally, Saban kept up his end of the deal, and now everything’s pointing toward the bigger goals and more talk of a dynasty. This time, though, it comes with an underdog twist and a quarterback who took a chance on himself long before Alabama ever did. ​