In case you fell asleep, Alabama beat Notre Dame by twenty-eight points in last night’s college-football national championship. Even that score suggests that the game was closer than it was. By the start of the second quarter, Alabama had twenty-one points. Notre Dame had twenty-three yards. By the third, lines were already forming at sporting-goods stores in Alabama to pick up official championship gear. By the end of the fourth, Alabama head coach Nick Saban had pulled his starters, unofficially instituting the mercy rule. When Alabama is on defense, the school’s Million Dollar Band often plays a snippet of “Work Song,” from “Les Misérables.”* Feelings about the movie aside, Alabama would have been kind to heed lyrics from elsewhere in the musical: “Look down, look down, and see the beggars at your feet / Look down and show some mercy if you can.”
Being a fan of any sports team involves a certain amount of self-delusion. I attended a pep rally for Notre Dame fans the other night and there were two primary themes. First, Notre Dame is a unique and special institution, unlike any other. “People have been asking me, if Notre Dame wins on Monday, does that mean Notre Dame football is back? I tell them, I don’t even think Notre Dame football went anywhere,” Joe Theismann, a former Notre Dame quarterback, said, ignoring several losing seasons in the past decade. In the second half, when all hope truly was lost, a friend who went to Notre Dame texted, after I offered my condolences: “The Irish are nothing if not eternally optimistic. I’m holding out hope.” It felt somewhat like the Romney campaign’s insistent belief that it would win the general election, in the face of all the data. (That would make ESPN the Fox News in this scenario, intent on hyping up the chances of the challenger against the objective information.) In an effort to convince themselves that they belonged on this stage, Notre Dame may have forgotten that it might have needed a trick or two to overcome its opponent.
The second point at the pep rally was that the S.E.C., Alabama’s conference, and winners of six straight national championships—make it seven—was not special and unique. There is much about the S.E.C. that irks outsiders, such as the decision by Alabama fans to start an S.E.C. chant after Alabama went up by four touchdowns, as if the dominance of one school, winners of three out of the past four national titles, could stand in for an entire region. But there was little hard evidence presented at the rally for the general degrading of the conference’s record, and what’s more, the focus on the conference at all, rather than the team at hand, represented another kind of delusion, or at least a diversion. Every S.E.C. team might not play “big-boy football,” as its supporters are so fond of saying, but Nick Saban’s Alabama teams certainly do.
Take Eddie Lacy. Alabama’s running back is merely the latest in a string of successes at the position. In 2009, Mark Ingram won the Heisman Trophy. His backup, Trent Richardson, later became the third pick in the N.F.L. draft. Lacy was Richardson’s backup on last year’s national-championship team, and after last night, when he ran for a hundred and forty-five yards, scoring two touchdowns, it’s hard to recall a moment when the first Notre Dame tackler brought him down. He was like a Jeep driving through dry savannah brush. At one point, Lacy shoved a Notre Dame lineman to the ground, less a stiff arm than a burial. In the third quarter, he barrelled toward the goal line as two Notre Dame defenders approached. Neither seemed especially interested in hitting Lacy head-on, so they ducked and dove. In a moment of grace amid the brutality—or perhaps mercy, given how he’d run over diving tacklers all night—Lacy spun to his left. Both defenders went by, barely grazing their target, and Lacy twirled into the end zone. The good news for future opponents is that Lacy is a junior, and might declare for the N.F.L. Draft. Here’s the bad news: Lacy’s backup, T. J. Yeldon, a freshman, ran for a hundred and ten yards of his own.
To Notre Dame’s credit, it was not beaten mentally, or intangibly. It was simply outmanned physically. The win was testament to the remarkable managerial job Nick Saban has done in turning Alabama into the prohibitive favorite to win every foreseeable national championship. Pending defections to the N.F.L., Saban will return about fifteen starters, while adding one of the nation’s top recruiting classes. (This trend shows no signs of stopping: two Alabama fans, sitting field-side, held up signs proclaiming themselves to be top recruits in the classes of 2023 and 2027.) Alabama has proven its worth, and though it’s possible that the S.E.C. may not be quite as dominant as its advocates want us to believe, I wouldn’t take any bets against them. They certainly aren’t betting against themselves: after the game, Mike Slive, the S.E.C. commissioner, posed for a photograph on the field with several others as confetti fell in celebration of the conference’s seventh consecutive championship. But that was already in the past. They held up eight fingers.
*The original version of this article incorrectly identified the song from “Les Misérables” played by the Alabama marching band when the team is on defense. It is a part of “Work Song,” not “Look Down.”
Photograph by Chris O’Meara/AP.
