Congrats, I suppose. I’m not one to go in for conference solidarity, especially given the raw deal Vanderbilt tends to get from the SEC, but after winning seven titles in a row it’s hard not to acknowledge there’s something to this “S-E-C” nonsense, even in a down year like this one. I’ve said it before, but this league is where the Big XII was five years ago: couple or three national contenders (Bama, UGA, A&M), couple or three solid competitors (Florida, LSU, South Carolina, maybe Vanderbilt) and a bunch of skells (not to deny credit to Ole Miss for the 7-6 come-up). And yet, given the vagaries of the BCS system, the Tide has lucked into a rematch last year against a beatable foe and a title game this year against an undefeated team that, in retrospect, was materially inferior to at least one and maybe two other teams not in the title game.
If nothing else, Notre Dame’s categoric defenestration should be a cautionary tale to everyone asserting that an undefeated team deserves a crack at the title. It wasn’t halftime before the Twitterati were moaning that Alabama-Oregon was the rightful matchup and damning Stanford for both a lucky break against the Ducks and an unlucky one against the Irish. And while Notre Dame’s 12-0 run was nothing to sneeze at, the number of close games – triple overtime to beat Pitt? The same Pitt that Ole Miss handled easily? – should have been a red flag: if the defense can’t stop somebody, the Irish aren’t going to keep up in a points race. And then – down 28-0 at the half, the most points they’d given up in any game all season, and one of my BFFs (Notre Dame ’90) called it a night and went to bed.
Thing is, it’s hard to root for this Bama team. Yes, I get that the college football blogosphere has venom for ND because they haven’t won a title since 1988 and have yet to win a BCS bowl game, and because they have the NBC deal and they have the independents’ clause into the BCS mix and they still have millions of fans with no other tie to the school. But so what? The B1G (formerly the Big Ten) has its own cable channel, and a brand of pious fart-sniffing superiority ill-suited to their abysmal performance in meaningful games since 2002, and an undefeated should-have-been champ on mega-probation and unable to compete. The Pac-12 took the best-aligned conference in America and stuck on two crap football teams, then set up a title game that got filled with a .500 school the first time out – because their standard bearer for a decade was a USC team that cheated their way to prominence and got the Pac-1 treatment from a conference administration that couldn’t care less about anything but the Rose Bowl. Boise State took a single win in a BCS game, by ONE point in overtime, requiring three ridiculous trick plays to get there, and spun it into being the rightful uncrowned champions every year thereafter forever on a schedule of one BCS foe to start the year and a diet of Girl Scout troops and crippled-veterans homes thereafter. Hell, the Big East got a BCS bid every year and deserved it about as much as the CCS league in California. And lest we forget, the only way Oklahoma won a BCS game in six tries was to get matched up against one of those 8-4 Big East champions. Yet the venom all goes to ND. I don’t get it.
Because let’s face it, despite what Brent Musburger said between ogling college girls, Bama didn’t “win it on the field.” They won a game, on a field, but they got to that field because of a steady and reliable media drumbeat for half a decade that any SEC school automatically trumps a school with an identical record from a different conference. One-loss Alabama trumps one-loss Kansas State or Oregon or Ohio State. ESS EEE SEEEEE. And within the conference, they benefited from a schedule that kept them from facing the full run of Georgia AND Florida AND South Carolina every year (much like Vandy gets to duck Bama AND Texas A&M AND the Bayou Bengals) and from a league whose officiating is more or less openly skewed in favor of whoever has the higher AP ranking. If Notre Dame is a product of hype, Alabama is no less such a product – and yet, they make it stand up in the clutch.
Charmed life, really. Florida gets two titles because of the confluence of Tim Tebow and Urban Meyer. LSU is in the right place at the right time when a two-loss team gets a crack at the title. Auburn’s lightning-in-a-beer-bottle run through a substandard SEC gives them a crack at an Oregon team whose offense was completely stoppable with a month to prep (and don’t forget Auburn’s defense was nationally ranked WELL below the Cal team that provided the blueprint in 2010). And Bama gets a second crack at an LSU team with no discernible offense, followed by a shot at an undefeated-but-eminently-defeatable Notre Dame.
You’ll notice I haven’t said anything about the Texas matchup after the 2009 season. That was the one I sweated. I wasn’t much of an Alabama fan at that point, but too much was at stake. A game in the Rose Bowl (if not the bowl game itself), for a 14-0 season and national title, featuring Alabama’s first Heisman winner, against the one foe in all of major college football that Bama had never won against…well, it was biblical stuff, to the point I went to Bible study because I was too scared to watch live. Which they did, of course, and at that point I guess I was done. Two years later, I was kind of secretly pulling for LSU (possibly thanks to the New Orleans residential presence in the house) and this year I kind of wanted ND, simply because a bunch of Papists taking a title from Bama right before Obama was sworn in again might have killed Cousin Pa for good.* And yet the process continues and the machine grinds on.
Because that’s what it is: a machine. One commenter on Twitter compared it to the Red Army hockey teams of the 1970s: joyless, merciless, indefatigable, inexorable, an unsmiling juggernaut that ground everything in its path to rubble. No venom, no emotion, no malice – a steamroller has no malice toward asphalt. Bama QB AJ McCarron has as many national championships as he has losses as a starter these last two years. Five players off last year’s Crimson Tide were taken in the first thirty-five picks of the NFL draft, and it didn’t even make a blip.
At this point, it’s the late-90s Yankees. It’s the Shaq-Kobe Lakers. It’s the new-look Miami Heat. It’s Manchester United. Everything leading up to the title is a foregone conclusion and the championship game is a formality. It’s equal parts triumphant victory and a sigh of relief that they weren’t the ones who broke the streak. And not to put too fine a point on it – it’s bred a strain of Alabama fans that are more annoying, more embarrassing, more entitled and arrogant and oblivious than anything Notre Dame cranked out at the height of the mid-20th century.
I think I knew that at some level. Cal was the halfway house that pried my affections open and made it feasible for me to go in on Vanderbilt, and James Franklin took care of the rest. I’ve got my team now. I could claim Alabama on the basis of a quarter-century of fandom and upbringing, and Vanderbilt might be tenuous because of my brief three-year sojourn and how it ended, but I’ve made my choice. And the joy in beating Tennessee and plating the most wins since the First World War is all the greater because we don’t have a rack of five-star prospects reloading every year. You can’t buy the merchandise in every sporting goods store in the country. Nobody’s thinking about us when the mindless crowds chant and tweet and scream “S-E-C” over and over. And we don’t have to win the BCS title game to give meaning to a successful season. We know who we are, and what we are, and we hold our heads higher for it, and somehow, that’s enough.
So go ahead, Tide. Congratulations. It’s yours. But it’s not mine, not any more, and that’s just fine with me.
* As it is, I can only point out that Bama has won three titles in four years since Obama was elected. Hopefully one can die of cognitive dissonance.