The One Biggest and Four Other Things That Will Make Alabama Unstoppable in the Playoffs
By: Larry Burton
Of course there could be more, but in this writer’s opinion these are the biggest five reasons that will propel Alabama to it’s next national championship.
Reason FIVE – The players that were injured, banged up, bruised and battered have had a chance to heal up will be ready for the games to come except one. These will be players that started the season in such an impressive fashion but not only will the Tide get them back, but the players that stood in for them are now battle tested as well and when they rotate in and out in these games, they will play like wily veterans themselves, not like substitutes.
Should injuries flare back up, we now have a lot more experienced talent than we did on day one.
Reason FOUR – Alabama has won so far without having to show all their cards as far any new plays, trick plays or so forth, so if Brian Daboll has something up his sleeve, no one has any film on it and it will certainly be a surprise. This isn’t just trick plays, but plays that could feature players heretofore left out of prominence. Such things would be like Lane Kiffin waiting till the playoffs to unleash O.J. Howard to such great production.
Reason THREE – Alabama’s rushing attack vs Clemson’s rushing defense. In their one loss this season, Clemson gave up over 162 yard rushing to 4-8 Syracuse, a team that of course didn’t even make it bowl season. Syracuse has the nation’s 69th rated rushing offense. If the Tide gets the rushing game going, it could be curtains for the Tigers.
Clemson’s averaged giving up 3.12 yard a carry against very mediocre competition. Expect Alabama to average at least 5.32 yards per carry. That’s certainly enough to keep the chains moving. In their one loss to Auburn, Alabama still managed to have their rushers average 5.6 yards a carry. However the big two, Damien Harris averaged a whopping 8.5 yards per carry and Bo Scarbrough averaged a healthy 7.7.
To put this in perspective, Auburn averages giving up just 3.5 yards per carry and Clemson averages about the same at 3.12. So if Harris and Scarbrough have the same kind of production against Clemson, but this time get many more carries in the game than they did against Auburn, then Alabama controls the clock and the scoring.
Reason TWO – In championship games, defense wins the big prize and Alabama’s is just better than Clemson’s. That’s opinion but cold hard stats given over a season’s worth of games. Also Alabama competed for over a third of their schedule without many of the key pieces of that defense and still rated higher than Clemson’s defensive squad. To make matters worse for Clemson, those missing pieces are now back and health at Alabama, so the squad should actually be better than the stats show they are.
But the BIGGEST reason is – Motivation. Alabama lost the last national championship in game they should have / could have won, but they let Clemson drive the field with time running out to win with two seconds left on the clock. Add to that all the talk how Alabama “backed in” to the championship game and may not deserve to be there. Alabama is the beast on the block to begin with and to give them added fire just makes them that much deadlier a foe to have to deal with.
Secondly, after coming off a loss to Auburn, this is a team that feels they have something to prove. They want to show the world that the Iron Bowl was a fluke loss and they are truly the nation’s number one team. They’ll want to make a statement in the Clemson game and we expect they’ll do just that.
While Clemson is certainly capable of winning the game against Alabama, only Alabama has the chance to win it in a blowout kind of fashion.
Larry Burton has been published in almost every media outlet for college sports and now primarily writes here for Touchdown Alabama. Follow Larry on Twitter for inside thoughts and game time comments at https://twitter.com/LBSportswriter
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