Game of Which Century?

Tomorrow night, Louisiana State, the best college football team in the land, will play the second best, Alabama. After eleven long years, “The Game of the Century” has finally arrived—again. For an event that is, by definition, singular, it has occurred rather often. There was Michigan vs. Ohio State five years ago, and Notre Dame vs. Florida State thirteen years before that, and going all the way back to the thirties there’s been a “Game of the Century” for practically every decade. College football, aided by a ranking system that lends itself to defining epochal battles, has been the most common recipient of the title, but it’s been attached to other contests too: a 1956 chess match between Donald Byrne and Bobby Fischer, a 1968 college basketball game, a 1970 World Cup semifinal, and a three-month-long bout of Go, the board game, that spilled from 1933 into 1934.

In that last encounter, both opponents, Honinbo Shusai and Go Seigen, were given twenty-four hours of “thinking time.” That’s considerably more than ESPN has allotted any of us over the past week. The network has covered every possible angle of tomorrow’s game, stopping just shy of examining the relative strengths of each university’s nineteenth-century literature programs. (We’ll give the nod to Alabama for the English department’s motto: “Totally making you read.”) ESPN’s various “All-Access” segments this week have informed us that L.S.U. coach Les Miles drinks between two and five cups of coffee each day and Alabama coach Nick Saban listens to Michael Jackson on the way to work in the morning. Natural vs. aural caffeination: let’s call that one a draw.

“Every time I plan my Saturday night around a big S.E.C. game, it ends up being a boring blowout,” a friend said the other day. That sentiment probably says as much about planning one’s life around televised sporting events as it does about the games themselves, but there’s a point nonetheless. These games rarely live up to the hype. Of the twenty-one games ESPN predicted would be this college-football season’s best, only eight have been decided by fewer than ten points. It’s always better to be pleasantly surprised (like we were in Game Six of this year’s World Series) than to sit through a relative letdown (like we did with the perfectly adequate Game Seven).

What would have to happen for Saturday night’s game to live up to its own hype—to become, say, “The Game of the Millennium”? A close contest, at least—overtime, perhaps—with more scoring than these defenses, the two best in the country, have allowed in any game this season. And which titan will triumph? L.S.U. currently claims the No. 1 ranking, but the game is in Tuscaloosa. All other things equal, we’re left to go back to our initial analysis: the Alabama English department puts the Tide on top.

Scene from last season’s L.S.U. vs. Alabama game. Photograph by Chris Graythen/Getty Images.