On Monday night, the Alabama Crimson Tide lost to the Georgia Bulldogs for the national championship in college football. Which was different from four years ago, when Alabama defeated Georgia for the title. Since 2010, Alabama has appeared in the title game nine times and won six of them. Since the College Football Playoff system was instituted in the 2014-2015 season, in part to produce a more competitive environment that would let the non-Alabamas of the world aim for a title, Alabama has competed in six title games and won three.
How good is this team? On Monday night, Georgia beat Alabama for its first national title since 1980. Georgia was fantastic — way better than my Michigan Wolverines, which Georgia crushed in the national semifinal game on New Year’s Eve — and has every chance of being extremely good next season, too. But that very same night, ESPN senior writer Mark Schlabach released his top 25 rankings for the upcoming season and put Georgia third. In first place? Alabama. Because, in general, if there is a college football season taking place, Alabama is going to be either the best team competing, or it’ll be playing the team that is in the national championship. The Tide is as certain as, well, the tide.
I need to be clear here for those of you who do not follow college football: For the last decade, Alabama has been so good that it has become almost more of a concept than a team. There’s a habit some fans of other college football teams have of chanting, “We want Bama!” or wielding signs bearing the same words at games where their team is winning, because the truest sign of superiority wouldn’t be to beat the team you’re already beating — it would be to beat Alabama.
Many observers are, perhaps understandably, tired of Alabama’s dominance in college football. The USA Today reporter Brent Schrotenboer even referred to Alabama as a “monopoly” after its national championship victory in 2021. To overthrow its rule, he suggested instituting a player draft and reducing the number of scholarships schools could offer football players to ensure parity. He also said that the playoffs should be expanded from four teams to eight, adding in another game to the current process in which semifinal games determine the two teams that play for the title. As Schrotenboer argued, “Alabama likely will dominate an added quarterfinal game even more than it did this year’s semifinal and final games. But it would increase the jeopardy for the Crimson Tide, forcing it to make an extra sudden-death step to the title.”
He’s not alone in advocating playoff expansion to try to unseat Alabama — and the Tide’s Southeastern Conference. There are 130 teams eligible to compete for a national title, but as Billy Witz and Alan Blinder wrote for The New York Times this week, since 2014, “just 13 universities have made playoff appearances, and some of them, like Alabama, Clemson and Ohio State, have repeatedly been contenders.” They point out that there are whole conferences that have never even gotten one team to play in a playoff game; even teams like Central Florida, which went undefeated in 2017 and 2018, haven’t made the cut.
College football playoff expansion would likely be good for the sport, giving more of the top teams and top players opportunities to test themselves against opponents outside of their conferences. But here’s the thing: If the sole purpose of expanding the playoffs is to stop Alabama, then it’s not even worth trying.
If Alabama had to play two teams in its march to the championship game, it would probably win. Three teams? That would likely be fine, too. Alabama’s position at the top isn’t because it hasn’t faced tough competition. It’s simply better than its competitors.
Expansion wouldn’t change that. As college football writer Spencer Hall told me: “There is no wand to wave where a 12-team playoff instantly increases the competitive diversity of this sport. It is a fantasy. And if that is something that you are wanting out of this, I suggest you want something else. ’Cause that ain’t happening.”
When people complain about Alabama’s dominance, they’re missing the point. To me, Alabama is sports at its best: not the wonder of competition or the joy of watching an underdog come out on top (obviously, though that’s pretty awesome, too), but the terror and awe of watching a behemoth. That term, “behemoth,” comes from Chapter 40 of the Book of Job, by the way, in which God describes a creature so powerful only he can kill it. “Its tail sways like a cedar,” its limbs are like “rods of iron,” the Lord says, and “a raging river does not alarm it.” And if you’ve ever seen Alabama play at home in the fourth quarter of a game against a feisty but overmatched opponent, well, this probably sounds pretty familiar.
And Alabama, like any good villain, is fully sentient, always learning, always improving, always finding new and even more terrifying ways to decimate its opponents. Over the past four seasons, Alabama has become more creative and dynamic on offense, averaging 488 yards per game in 2021. In 2015, the Tide averaged 427 yards of offense per game. No surprise, the 2015 version of Alabama still won a national title.
Of course, teams do, on occasion, beat Alabama, as we saw this week. Since the 2010-2011 season, Alabama has lost a total of 17 games. (For comparison, Michigan State, which is really good, has lost 47 games in the same period.) I think I remember parts of all of them: In 2021, there was Rachel House Small, the wife of Texas A&M kicker Seth Small, holding hands with Seth’s mother as her husband kicked the game-winning field goal to defeat Alabama, then leaping onto the field to celebrate in a moment that became pandemonium.
And, in 2013, the Auburn University Marching Band’s ebullient, emotional, exhilarating reaction to Auburn’s defeat of Alabama on a last-second field goal returned for a touchdown in one of the most incredible moments in college football history, the “Kick Six.” I watched that game on a laptop in London, and I can tell you what the bedroom I was in looked like and how fuzzy the internet connection was. That’s what happens when you’re Alabama — your losses are so rare that they become precious jewels of football memorabilia.
It’s important to remember that the Tide went 7-6 in Coach Nick Saban’s first year in Tuscaloosa back in 2007, and before his arrival, the Alabama football teams of the early 2000s were sometimes pretty good and sometimes kind of mediocre. The year I was born, 1987, Alabama went 7-5. It was another team, the Miami Hurricanes, that finished 12-0 that year and won the national championship, part of an era for that team when it was so utterly superior to its opponents that the players had plenty of opportunities to invent new end zone celebrations.
Someday, Alabama won’t be Alabama anymore. Let’s appreciate this thing of beauty — or, more accurately, this unstoppable hell beast from the great beyond — while we can.
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Jane Coaston is the host of Opinion’s podcast “The Argument.” Previously, she reported on conservative politics, the G.O.P. and the rise of the right. She also co-hosted the podcast “The Weeds.”@janecoaston
