Alabama Football: Is Tide-Clemson equal to Cavs-Warriors?

Alabama football looks to be, once again, on a collision course with the Clemson Tigers for the championship. How similar is that to the NBA Finals?

It’s becoming academic that the top two programs in college football will get a chance for a rubber match in this season’s national championship game. Both Alabama and Clemson are undefeated, roaring loudly through the jungle that is the NCAA football landscape. Every time another team has thought Alabama or Clemson has grown weak, ready for the vultures to circle in for an upset win, both programs have crushed the usurpers underfoot.

As Edward Aschoff of ESPN recently put it, “The Tide and Tigers have crushed any expectation of parity at the top in this sport, as we all have to come to grips with the fact that these are the two best teams in the country … again.”

Aschoff also makes a solid point about anyone saying that it’s still a long season: “Clemson currently has zero ranked opponents left on its schedule, while the only one Alabama looks as if it’ll have to worry about is Auburn.”

Alabama won the first meeting in the national championship two seasons ago, while Clemson won the most recent encounter. Neither program seems to have missed a beat, considering both programs have lost a ton of talent to the NFL over the last couple of years. Both teams are recruiting top prospects to replace proven talent each year, seducing more and more great players away from other college football teams.

Who wants to play by themselves in an insignificant bowl game when they could be playing with an elite team in the national championship, seemingly every year?

That’s the optics that the NBA has projected since the start of this decade.

Cue the Miami Heat.

LeBron James, arguably the biggest name and best player in basketball, famously took his talents to South Beach to play with Dwayne Wade and Chris Bosh, forming the ‘Big 3’. All three players were in the prime of their careers and announced to the world that they were going to win multiple championships in a row. They appeared in four straight championships, winning two of them between 2011-2014.

Now, the NBA is drooling over the latest rivalry that has made them a ton of cash by captivating basketball fans around the globe. In 2014, King James decided that Miami wasn’t where his heart was and returned back to the Cleveland Cavaliers, the team that drafted him which is near his hometown of Akron, Ohio. While that was happening, the Golden State Warriors grouped a bunch of older talented players who never became big stars for other teams and put them with a young, second-generation star named Stephen Curry.

The matchup was born.

The Warriors looked unbeatable, until they faced the Cavs in the 2015 Finals. The Cavs, however, lost one of their young stars, Kyrie Irving to injury, allowing the Warriors to concentrate on LeBron defensively. The Warriors won the first encounter in the championships.

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Since then, both the Cavs and Warriors have restocked with talent, through free agency and trades. The Cavs won in 2016, forcing the Warriors to find another big name to add to their arsenal: Kevin Durant. The move proved controversial but effective. Durant, beloved in Oklahoma City, felt playing with an elite team for a championship was worth leaving the team that drafted him and Russell Westbrook, a great talent who didn’t seem like he wanted to share the ball much.

Durant’s move to the Warriors was enough to beat the Cavs in their rubber match and secure another championship. Durant went to where everyone was a star, not just a couple people.

Even with many other NBA teams using the Warriors and Cavs as their business model, stacking their rosters with big names so that they inevitably beat up on weaker teams and make it to the playoffs easily, there is one constant: everyone thinks that the Warriors and Cavs will make it to the NBA Finals for a fourth straight time.

Is that what’s happening in college football? Is that even good for college football?

It seems that all of the other football teams are fighting it out for third place, as Alabama and Clemson look untouchable, at present. Offensively, defensively, and even on special teams, both head coaches Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney have restocked their teams for another opportunity at a national championship.

The major factor in all of these moves is that many of the starters are young. Alabama’s starting quarterback Jalen Hurts is looking like a Heisman Trophy winner and he’s only a sophomore. Clemson’s QB Kelly Bryant is only a junior. Many of the star players, on both sides of the ball, are in similar situations, making them the present and the future of their respective teams.

With even more top recruits confirming their choices to come to both of these programs, there looks like no stopping either of these freight trains from crashing into each other, time and time again, in the national championship for years to come.

Next: The Tide and the Aggies go way back

One thing is certain: it looks like more and more elite football players would rather play in national championships as a group than get smashed out of the playoffs as a star with only a possible chance of being drafted in the NFL. The national championship is where the big boys are playing, while the rest are being forgotten quickly.

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