In the aftermath of “The Beating”, as a crystal football was held high into the warm winter air of Miami, the sound of Lynard Skynard’s ode to Alabama oozed out of the speakers in Sun Life Stadium.
“Sweet Home Alabama” was a befitting end to this night, this season.
No. 2 Alabama (13-1) defeated No. 1 Notre Dame (12-1) by a lopsided score of 42-14 to claim the 2012 National Championship and the school’s third national title in four years. It marked the Crimson Tide’s 15th National Championship in football (the school’s count), and for head coach Nick Saban, his fourth, cementing the claim to a dynasty.
By dominating this game in every fashion, it bolstered the crystal-clear notion that the Alabama Crimson Tide are the quintessential historic college football team. Not Notre Dame, not USC, not Texas. Never has a school and a sport meant so much to its fan base, to its state and to a region.
In hindsight, it would appear we all got a little carried away with this one. From breaking down the matchup in ways that gave Notre Dame a puncher’s chance to comparing this historic matchup with each school’s respective counterparts from years gone by.
Let’s just settle this: there will never be another Bear Bryant, another Knute Rockne. Between the Houndsooth Hat and the Galloping Ghosts, this matchup represented history on paper. Forrest Gump versus Rudy. But no hype machine on earth can make this 1973 or 1966. Rudy was an underdog. Forrest was an All-American with blazing speed. Gump was greater than Rudy on this night.
Run, Forrest, run.
But the sequence of plays that lead to “The Beating” proved that aura and mystique only take you so far, for either school. You need speed. You need size. You need precision.
Brian Kelly is a fine football coach, and as a lifelong fan of the Fighting Irish, I’m happy to have him. He’s just what was needed to restore this program to relevancy. And he has. A 12-0 undefeated regular season against a better schedule than people want to give credit for is way more than I expected this season – or frankly any of the next three seasons.
Yet there remains a vast difference between relevancy and relevant. Being in the conversation is not the same as being the center of the conversation. Notre Dame accomplished getting into the former, while Alabama has and is the latter.
When a football team and its fan base remains largely stuck in its past, as Notre Dame has, something has to change. You cannot get young high schoolers who weren’t even born the last time Notre Dame won the national title (1988) to commit based on its tradition and history. You have to show them something. And this is a fine start. This is where Alabama was five or six years ago, on the cusp of relevancy, struggling to maintain consistency.
For whatever it’s worth, Notre Dame deserved to be in this game. The only bowl-eligible undefeated team with wins over Stanford (who beat Oregon at Oregon and won the Rose Bowl) and at Oklahoma, as well as winning at USC (the preseason No. 1 team) was good enough to be selected for this game under this system. The outcome doesn’t prove Notre Dame was overhyped or fraudulent, it just proved Alabama was much, much better.
And therein is the major take away from this unruly affair: Alabama is vastly superior, vastly consistent and properly rated. As we debated over the past two weeks – following Florida’s embarrassing loss to Louisville and the SEC’s less than stellar bowl season showing – if the SEC was down and what that could potentially mean for the BCS title game, we forgot one thing: Alabama is different.
They are coached by Nick Saban, who’s been criticized by many, including me, as being an emotionless coaching droid. But what Saban’s lack of human emotion seems to stir in the rest of us really matters little; his results conjure all the emotional bond he needs with his players and fans. Take away those two lost seasons with the Miami Dolphins and the NFL, Saban’s won four national titles in eight years (he won one with LSU in 2003).
Who cares if Saban resembles the statue of himself outside Bryant-Denny Stadium – in more than just appearance – when he’s off the football field? Who cares if he allows himself and his staff just 48 hours to celebrate championships? And what does it matter if he enjoys a Gatorade bath like a cat enjoys being doused with water?
“Whether I look it or not,” Saban said following the game, “I’m happy as hell.”
Whether it matters or not, we shouldn’t care if he enjoys it. Why would Saban’s enjoyment of his life and accomplishments have any bearing on how we view them? Because we’re human, mostly. And we internalize these things and think, “Oh for pete’s sake, Nick, smile!” We would, right? If we were Saban, we’d be up there begging for more Gatorade to be dumped over our heads, for players to hug us and to sing our praises. We’d soak it all in and smile.
But we’re not Nick Saban.
I watched this game with my 10-year-old son, whom I’ve naturally and carefully crafted into a Notre Dame fan. Unsurprisingly, he went to bed in disgust in the middle of the third quarter. It was painful to watch, but only because – as I told him – the team had come so far and shown so little of what got them there. The hardest thing to do is reach the pinnacle and fall short of actually winning and celebrating.
It’s what we all dream of as kids and as adults, as fans. Those moments of cheering as the clock winds down, basking in the glow of success.
And perhaps that’s why we don’t understand Nick Saban. We’re all vastly different from him. And he’s very different from Bear Bryant. And its not the 1970s.
But maybe that’s why Nick Saban keeps on winning, because he’s different. He may not have the flair for the dramatic. He may not wear a Houndsooth Hat or have the Southern gentleman accent.
He may not feel the glory of victory or the agony of defeat – which is what allows him to just keep going, keep working, keep pushing.
It’s what might make him the greatest college football coach of all-time, at least statistically, before it’s all said and done.
I just hope, for a moment, as the trophy was held there above his head late on a Monday night in Miami, he could hear the song coming out of the speakers and know that for an awful lot of people, it meant something to them.
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