One team has to lose every great game.
It’s a fact of life. People say some games don’t deserve a loser, and it’s actually true in the games we remember. The last matchup of the college football season was one of those.
Monday night, college football fans everywhere enjoyed a great game. They enjoyed a rough-and-tumble, skilled slugfest where two elite teams traded body blow after body blow in a stadium that cannot officially hold the number of fans that came. The orange and crimson ebbed and flowed with each swing of momentum in a game worthy to be called a championship.
It truly was a battle royale featuring the two best teams in the country. At the very least, it featured two of the teams in the top tier of the country, lest we ignore a handful of others capable of competing at such a level on a given day.
Monday’s game had everything. It had power. It had finesse. It had a chess match featuring some of the game’s best minds. It had two fan bases desperate for a victory, if for different reasons and operating in different paradigms. It had two coaches at the pinnacle of the profession that function on opposite ends of the spectrum.
The game had only one turnover and six accepted penalties. More than 1,000 yards were gained against a pair of defenses respected around the country. There were three ties and four lead changes. Two players who combined to score two touchdowns in 28 total games this season—Clemson’s Hunter Renfrow and Alabama’s O.J. Howard—combined for four in this game alone.
College football needed a game like this—maybe even more than either team needed to win it.
Contrast that with the rest of the bowl season. In the previous forty postseason games following the 2015 season, fewer than half—15, to be precise—were decided by single digits. Only eight were decided by five points or fewer.
Even the two biggest games of the season were laughers. Clemson’s second-half throttling of Oklahoma and Alabama’s shutout shellacking of Michigan State were decided by an average of 29 points. The average margin of victory in all postseason games prior to Monday night was a whopping 15.9 points per game.
See, this was a very important game for college football. Ratings were down in the biggest games of the year. Even the ones with significant buzz lacked the substance necessary to captivate audiences for long stretches of time.
It’s not outrageous to suggest Clemson needed to win less than any other entity represented. Alabama loses, and the whole season goes up in flames. The Tide are defined by winning games like Monday’s, and they played like a team accustomed to being in that environment.
Clemson’s season was defined long before the ball kicked off on Monday night. A win would have been icing on the cake. Instead, the Tigers will have to settle for being national runners-up—not half bad considering even that distinction has eluded the program for almost its entire history.
Sure, Clemson could have played better. Special teams issues did critical damage to the cause in the second half. Blunders in the secondary helped pace Alabama to almost 500 yards of offense and four big-play touchdowns. Missed opportunities on offense will haunt the team for an entire offseason.
But even with those negatives, there were enough positives that Clemson’s overall effort would have been good enough to win on many nights, against many teams. It just wasn’t in the cards against an Alabama team that couldn’t have played much better.
Most importantly, though, Clemson proved it belonged on the biggest of stages, with the biggest of bullies. The end result was a truly great national title game, something college football fans everywhere—even fans of the Tigers—have to be excited about.
God Bless!
WQ