Well, depending on how you count, that’s either number 9 or number 14. On the one hand, I think Alabama’s claim to a title in 1941 is risible at best, but on the other hand, it’s the acme of ridiculous to assert that somehow college football had no champions in almost seven decades before the AP poll got going. Either way, the team of my childhood now has a pretty solid claim to being the most decorated school of all time with national championships.
And it should have been pretty obvious where this was headed. The underdog always seems to have an advantage in BCS bowls, making better use of the six-to-eight-week layoff – consider how Utah defenestrated Alabama three years ago – but there’s also the small consideration that Alabama hasn’t lost a 1-vs-2 bowl game with title implications since round about Watergate. If you were betting on history, Alabama was the bet – and if you saw the 41 point line in Vegas and took the over, you don’t deserve to have that money. That wasn’t a wager, that was an IQ test.
It felt weird to have no rooting interest in the game. I was so nervous about the 2009 matchup that I couldn’t watch it live – but that was different: it was Texas, it was Pasadena, it was Rose-Bowl-by-proxy for the first time in sixty years plus, it was having a Heisman winner on the Bama bench and Keith Jackson tossing the coin. Or as I said then…
No shit-talking here. It would be intellectually dishonest of me to present as some sort of born-again Alabama fan now, after all these years of dissociating myself from the state and the fandom. If I’m honest, the Crimson Tide have been my fourth football team at best since about 2000, behind the Redskins and Vandy and Cal. So as much as it does mean to me to beat Tennessee and Auburn, as much as this would have meant to me fifteen years ago – I can’t lie: I will be DVR’ing the game and attending a theology class on Thursday night.
And there we go.
For a Cal follower, there were some nasty flashbacks watching LSU, as Les Miles inexplicably stuck with a quarterback who was plainly not fit for purpose – only to watch him get ground into powder by an inexorable force. For a connoisseur of defense, there was the pleasure of watching maybe the best Bama defense of all time – barring neither 1961, 1979 nor 1992 – shut out a team that had averaged forty points a game against the best schedule in the country and finish #1 in all four categories (rushing, passing, scoring and total defense). For most neutral observers, watching after years of Big XII pinball offense and Oregon hurry-up, a game with five field goals and a missed PAT on the lone touchdown was too dull for words – which says more about the nature of the ESPN hype machine than anything, and the World Wide Leader’s de facto ownership of the sports has done more than even the BCS to bring down the quality of the game.
The one bright point for folks outside the Yellowhammer State is that other conferences will probably be more amenable than ever to considering the SEC’s oft-tabled proposal for a plus-one system. 1 vs 4 and 2 vs 3 on New Years Day, in existing bowls, the winners to face off a week later in a title game. This, to me, is the best option – the “least sufficient privilege” as an Apple developer would put it. For one thing, it explicitly doesn’t provide a seat on the starship for every conference champion; the ACC and Big East have done a good job of proving the fallacy that winning your league entitles you to a prize bowl. For another, it’s sufficient – when was the last time a team from outside the top five had a legit claim to a national championship? Not to a BCS bowl berth, mind – if you’re top-10, you probably ought to be there, although 9 and 10 should probably be restricted to the Fiesta Bowl only and leave the Rose, Sugar, Cotton and Orange for the big boys. But if you have to argue that you should be the #4 team in the country, you probably don’t have a very good argument that you should be #1.
So where does that leave us this year? LSU-Stanford and Bama-OkieLite. I have to think that we wind up with the same matchup as last night, albeit with the yapping muted – bar perhaps Oregon fans arguing that they beat Stanford head-to-head and deserve the shot. At which point the usual suspects will crank up again, and no one will stop carping until there’s a 16-team tournament and the Sun Belt winner is free-rolled in, and even after that some people won’t be pleased until Boise State gets a national championship…
It’s college football. If you need an epitaph for this horrible season just brought to a close, make it this: nobody deserves anything.