MIAMI GARDENS, Florida – At the end of a long, grueling, weird, uncomfortable season for college football, we finally got a little bit of normalcy, while the final seconds ticked off Monday night at Hard Rock Stadium: Alabama, picking up another national championship trophy after winning the dominant, historic.
Only a few spectators remained to see the celebration, a small part of the approximately 14,000 fans allowed to enter the installation, given all the restrictions in force. In any other year, the field is looted with friends, family, media, photographers, event staff in a big celebration that takes place with 10 depths along the makeshift stage. On Monday night, a lone player made snow angels in fallen confetti, while his teammates hugged only the team staff.
Winning Alabama felt like the inevitable end, of course, because the most dominant coach in the sport brought together the most dominant team with the most dominant players. For those who are just attending Monday’s National Football Championship at the College Football College presented by AT&T against Ohio State, believing that they could You only see a competitive game, they saw the exhibition no. 13 showing why the Buckeyes simply had no chance.
DeVonta Smith, the winner of the Heisman Trophy, had the state of Ohio so complete that he broke several game records before the break and would have shattered more if he had not dislocated a finger on his right hand. Najee Harris was on the run, bulldozing the Buckeyes with such force, their collective wills inevitably broke. Leading everyone was defender Mac Jones, who orchestrated another almost flawless offensive performance, while, yes, setting his own championship records along the way.
The Crimson Sea could not be stopped during the season. They could not be stopped in a winning performance of the 52-24 championship that no one will soon forget.
“For me, this team has achieved almost more than any other team,” said Alabama coach Nick Saban, who won a seventh national title. “I’ve played 13 games, I’ve been undefeated with all the interruptions I’ve had this season. I think there’s a lot to write about when it comes to the team’s legacy.”
This Alabama team will have a special place in history and rightly so. What this team has accomplished goes beyond fantasy and Heisman points and stats. Players in this sport have sacrificed more than they have ever done; they endured more than they ever had; they were challenged both physically and mentally in ways that remain difficult to understand.
They played football during a pandemic.
It may not sink into how remarkable this season was until much later, perhaps years ago, with time to reflect on the extraordinary circumstances in which it all unfolded.
“It’s been an unprecedented year, with a lot of adversity,” said Alex Leatherwood, Alabama offensive striker. “But we just stayed the course. We tried to stay focused and we took everything day in and day out and we really managed to buy everyone and get stuck in what we wanted to achieve – and we came out victorious.”
Ohio State pressed for this opportunity, believing that it also has a championship caliber team, led by Justin Fields. Although the Buckeyes started their season later than Alabama, they dealt with countless coronavirus problems to get to this point – and even discussed whether to postpone this championship game because they had more COVID-19 problems in it. last week.
All this speaks to the uncertainty that has filled this season. No one really knew if college football would reach the finish line, as coaches told virtually anyone who would listen, “You’re as good as your last test.” The season felt precarious every day, coaches, players and coaches holding their breath waiting for the results of the coronavirus tests.
This increased the pressure on the players as they did their best to follow all safety protocols to continue playing. While the SEC teams took care of the outbreaks and Saban took care of the coronavirus itself, only one team felt truly safe: Alabama, thanks to Smith, Harris, Jones, and everyone else. Yes, there were a few close calls along the way. But this is a team that failed to score 40 or more points just twice and had three players finish in the top five for Heisman – and you could make a very real case today that they should have finished 1- 2-3.
This is not just a coincidence, of course. Saban recruits the best players, then develops the best players. But even this type of offensive performance was not pre-ordered. Saban saw the moving landscape in college football toward open crime, with the score at will, and moved with it – reinventing the Crimson Sea into an unstoppable offensive force. Consider the first two times he won a national championship with Alabama: The Tide scored 58 points combined – just six more than where they reached Monday night.
Alabama offensive coordinator Steve Sarkisian once again called a masterpiece. Knowing fully that Smith would be the basis of each piece, he put Smith in new and different formations to bring the ball to him. But most of the time, Smith just got behind the Ohio defenders and overtook them. By the end of the first half, Smith had 12 catches for 215 yards and three touchdowns, broke three SEC career records, set a BCS / CFP championship game record, tied another and set a record. of school bowl.
“He does a very good job of playing a game,” Saban said of Sarkisian. “He knows what the other team is doing, he knows how to attack it, he knows where to put the players in order to put them in a position to be able to play those games against what the other team is doing. He just did a fantastic job this year. “
Meanwhile, Jones threw for 464 yards – beating Joe Burrow’s BCS / CFP championship record and tying Burrow’s touch record with five.
A year after college football experts said Burrow’s LSU team was the biggest offense of all time, Alabama claimed its own crown. None of this should be a shock: Alabama missed the playoffs a year ago and followed the Tigers’ rival by going through the world in a similar way. Did anyone think Saban would be okay with that?
Jones, who hit a bruised foot for a good piece in the second half and gave another perfectly placed pass after another, took a step further than Alabama declared the biggest offense.
“I think we’re the best team he’s ever played,” Jones said. “There is no team that will ever play an SEC program like this again. But at the same time, we are so happy that we won this game and put the icing on the cake. There was not a lot of pressure; we just wanted let’s go out there and play the game we’ve all been playing since we were 5 years old. “
Despite all the unknowns about how this season would unfold, the Crimson Sea is committed to each other.
“We had a mission,” Smith said. “Everyone wanted to end things the right way. We all came to work every day and got engaged. We got the result we wanted.”
And finally, the result we could all see coming.