Everyone loves to pick on a winner, when the winner isn’t their favorite. Ask anyone who has ever been elected President of the United States. Winners make easy targets. It isn’t much fun picking on losers.
And so it has been with the University of Alabama’s national championship football team since the Crimson Tide rolled through, stomped on and sped away from LSU’s outstanding Southeastern Conference championship team in the BCS National Championship game Monday.
The final score was 21-0, Alabama. The Tide won the game, the championship and the glass trophy that goes with all of that.
Since the game ended, newspapers, talk radio hosts and non-Alabama fans have been critical of the victory because Alabama scored just one touchdown during the contest. The winners also kicked five field goals in the championship game. When the teams met during the regular season, LSU won a tremendous game, 9-6, in overtime. Nobody scored a touchdown in the first meeting.
“Half a great team,” opined the Los Angeles Times after the title game. The talking heads have said worse.
The criticism is unwarranted, uninformed and unfair.
Unfair, that is, to the LSU team. The Tigers’ defense kept Alabama’s powerful running game out of the end zone for better than 100 consecutive wonderfully brutal minutes of college football. Two of the best defenses the college game has seen in decades thumped each other for 60 tough minutes in the championship game.
When did we get to the point where winning with defense is a bad thing? If you really love the game, you appreciate great players on both sides of the ball. Baby, read this carefully: Alabama and LSU had great players on both sides of the ball but that Alabama defense was something special. What’s wrong with that?
The championship game kept you on the edge of your seat (unless you were pacing back and forth in front of your television, mumbling to yourself) from start to finish. The best two teams in the country hammered at each other for the national championship and Alabama won.
If the final score had been 56-54, would the Times have groaned about “Half a great team,” that won the title? Probably not and that’s silly.
A final point: Announcer Brent Musberger evoked the name of Paul ‘Bear’ Bryant, the legendary Alabama coach, during the closing minutes of Monday’s game. Musberger wondered if the Tide’s second title in three seasons under Coach Nick Saban was enough to make Alabama fans forget Bryant.
Then Musberger answered his own question, saying, no, they’ll never forget Bryant in Tuscaloosa.
What Musberger could have said was that Saban’s 2011 championship effort was Bryant-esqe. Alabama played hard-nosed defense, defeated LSU’s excellent special teams and threw in a few surprises while avoiding mistakes on offense to win the national title. That, my friends, was Bear Bryant football.
Somewhere, the Bear was shaking hands on Monday and complimenting all the mommas and papas for the way their boys played. That’s what the LA Times and all the rest of us should be doing.
Thanks for reading. Roll Tide.
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