Alabama Football: Jalen Hurts keeps Clemson in his sights

Alabama football starting quarterback Jalen Hurts, as frosty as ever, is not getting caught up in the hype of the Tide being the villains against Clemson.

People love to hate Alabama football, especially this season.

The Alabama Crimson Tide made it into the fourth spot in the college football playoff, narrowing out Ohio State. The skin of their teeth was enough to upset every non-Alabama fan across the nation. Not that they needed more motivation to hate on the Crimson Tide.

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Michael Casagrande of AL.com recently reported Tide cornerback Levi Wallace commenting on the hate: “We’re seen as the villain. I’m sure a lot of people don’t like Alabama because we’re always so good each and every year.”

It can be easy to let that hate consume the players, either into a distracting angst or into a blinding overconfidence. However, Alabama’s quarterback Jalen Hurts sees it very differently, and he kept his words short and sweet: “They’re the national champions, […] we’re not. So …”

To be the man, you gotta beat the man.

Anyone can paint the Crimson Tide with the villain brush. Jealousy and ignorance make prejudice easy to perform. Yet, Hurts remembers all too well how last season’s championship game went.

Even after going 13 for 31 in pass completions for only 131 yards, Hurts led Alabama to just over a minute of winning the national championship in his freshman year. It took Clemson making an unbelievable drive at the end of the fourth quarter to defeat the Crimson Tide.

Arguably, if Bo Scarbrough did not get injured in that game, after earning 93 yards and two touchdowns on just 16 carries, Alabama would have had two national championship victories in a row. Instead, Alabama could only watch as the Tigers celebrated their win with confetti streaming down from the heavens.

Was the villain vanquished that night? What did Alabama do to be considered the villain?

Was it that Hurts was only a freshman, and the rest of the college football world felt that he didn’t deserve the championship as much as Clemson’s veteran quarterback Deshaun Watson? Did it upset Alabama haters that Clemson’s attempts at suckering Tide players into penalties failed because they didn’t bite on the fight bait?

Or was it that Clemson’s passion that they wore on their sleeve still almost lost to the calm and collected Crimson Tide for a second year in a row? Is there some code of conduct in college football that states that all players must go crazy on every down to be considered real men?

If so, I hereby relinquish my ‘man card.’

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If anything, Oklahoma fans should be taking that villain brush and smearing it all over the Tigers. Clemson is the team that is ranked first in the nation for these playoffs, not Alabama. Clemson is also the team that lost to unranked Syracuse and played in a pretty weak conference, regardless of Miami’s recent comeback success.

Anyone still thinking that Alabama is a villain because they got in ahead of Ohio State should not forget that the Buckeyes lost to unranked Iowa by more than 30 points and had two losses. Alabama only lost once, and it was by 12 to highly ranked Auburn. What is there to discuss when one team loses terribly and more often compared to the other?

Hurts, as Iceman-like as ever, stated the situation perfectly: Clemson is the man, so Alabama has to beat them to then even be considered the man. He never said that Clemson is some villain, as he does not let the hype train roll around in his world. All that he wants to do is to roll the Tide over Clemson to get another shot at the national championship title.

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Villain? Fine. Whatever. Alabama fans, give haters two claps and a Ric Flair. That’s how one does a ‘Roll Tide’ as a proper villain, the one people love to hate. *Clap, Clap, WOOOOO!*

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