Tag Archives: alabama

The de facto national championship preview: The players

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Yesterday’s de facto national championship preview focused on the coaches. Today’s looks at the players.

Alabama and LSU players were in the news before the season even started, which, given each team’s potential for success isn’t surprising by itself. That both teams’ players were in the preseason news for off-field reasons is notable, though. It may seem like an age ago, but Alabama was one of the places hit very hard by the tornadoes that devastated parts of the lower Midwest and Southeast earlier this year. Tuscaloosa was a direct hit. A month later, Sports Illustrated ran a cover story by Lars Anderson that is one of the most powerful sports pieces I’ve read. Facing personal losses themselves, the Tide football players nevertheless had to stand tall in a community and a state that looked to them– as they always had in good times– for support in bad times. Terror, Tragedy And Hope in Tuscaloosa.

LSU players made their way into the preseason, non-sports news in a manner less worthy of an emotional SI cover and an earnest letter home. Keep reading…

The de facto national championship preview: The coaches

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In college football, players come and go, and it’s the coaches who are more likely to become the lasting face of a particular team. Adding to this is the common college football notion of coaching “systems.” Coaching in the NFL is more about coordinators and their “schemes”– the Wide Nine really isn’t a defensive “system,” and the Wildcat really isn’t an offensive one, though it may be offensive to some– although coaches have developed systems at that level, including Bill Walsh’s West Coast offense and Tony Dungy’s Tampa 2. Systems certainly are in play at the high school level, but they frequently are crazy and not at all viable even at the college level. Think Wing-T, A-11, and, of course, the Wishbone.

The major college level is the Goldilocks of coaching systems, however, and along with this comes coaching personalities and attitudes that can influence the on-field performance of the impressionable, yet quite capable yoots.  

This installment of our ongoing coverage of LSU vs. Alabama, the de facto national championship, therefore focuses on the two coaches …Keep reading…

The de facto national championship

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One of college football’s biggest challenges, from an institutional perspective, has been its ability to crown a consensus national champion at year’s end. The first memory I have of controversy in this regard was the 1997 split championship between Michigan and Nebraska that precipitated the implementation of the BCS in 1998. (I don’t know if that decision actually precipitated the BCS, because that system may have been in the works already, but it felt that way at the time.) The BCS did not bring peace and happiness across the land, however, and the criticism that started then– I recall writing an editorial on the arbitrariness of BCS outcomes as sports editor of a newspaper in the early 2000s– has only grown in scope and volume, even reaching the halls of the U.S. Senate and the Department of Justice, and the favors it grants upon certain athletic conferences certainly has been part of the fuel for the conference realignment conflagration that burns to this day.

By some magic mix of scheduling, on-field performance, coaching, recruiting, and everything else that goes into making one particular football game happen the way it happens and mean what it means, though, we have been gifted a national championship game this year that really is as free from controversy as one could imagine, a matchup of two undefeated teams, either of which could be ranked #1, playing in the toughest division of the toughest conference in the country, and largely dominating their opponents to this point. On Saturday night in Tuscaloosa, #1 LSU will meet #2 Alabama for what many see as the de facto national championship. The BCS’ noncomical Rube Goldberg machine may churn out a pairing at season’s end that will garner national consensus, but this Saturday’s game is a guarantee; it provides certainty and assurance, things the BCS largely has failed to give teams and fans since its inception.

In anticipation of this game, plan on daily coverage this week* from ALDLAND to get you ready for it.

* Disclosure: This is likely to severely decrease our unplanned coverage of the Breeders’ Cup. In our stead, I recommend the sports page of the Louisville Courier-Journal.