Alabama Football: Crimson Tide has an All-American talent advantage

Based on midseason All-American selections, Alabama football has an appreciable talent advantage over every other team in the FBS.

College football fans can look to more than a dozen sources for All-American selections. Even for passionate Alabama football fans, that is too many sources to define a consensus. A better way to track All-American viability is to consider only the sources used by the NCAA to establish Consensus All-American status.

Those sources are the Associated Press (AP), Football Writers Association of America (FWAA), American Football Coaches Association (AFCA), Walter Camp Foundation (WCFF) and Sporting News (SN). In this case, ESPN and Sports Illustrated are on the outside, looking in.

The AP and SN midseason All-American lists were released this week. The AP selected a first and second team, SN restricted its selections to only a first team.

Check out the complete selection lists: Midseason AP and Midseason Sporting News.

Alabama Football Leads the Selection Lists

Players from 29 schools were chosen for the two AP teams. The Crimson Tide was the only school to earn more than four selections. Six Crimson Tiders were selected. The four on the first team are all offensive players: Tua Tagovailoa, Jonah Williams, Ross Piersbacher and Jerry Jeudy. Deionte Thompson and Quinnen Williams for named to the second team defense.

LSU was second to the Crimson Tide with four players, including three first team defense selections: Greedy Williams, Grant Delpit and Devin White. The Tigers’ placekicker, Cole Tracy was named to the second team.

Wisconsin and Clemson had three players selected. The seven schools with two players chosen are Oregon; Oklahoma; Texas A&M; Washington; Notre Dame, Ohio State and Kentucky.

The SN list has four Tide players; Tua, Jonah Williams, Jerry Jeudy and Deionte Thompson. Also on the SN list was Clemson with three players and two each from Wisconsin, LSU, Oklahoma and Georgia.

A total of 17 SEC players made the AP first and second team lists. After the six from the Crimson Tide, six other SEC schools combined for the other 11 SEC players selected. Seven SEC schools had no players chosen: Arkansas; Auburn; Florida; Missouri; South Carolina; Tennessee and Vanderbilt.

Power Five teams dominated the two midseason lists. Group of Five teams with one selection each are Houston, Hawaii, Colorado State, UCF and USF.

The 2018 Alabama football offense is well represented by midseason All-Americans. Of course, it takes far more than six players to win games. It is often said championship teams are best measured, not by the top 22 players, or even the next 22, but by the next group of 20 or so players regularly key to team success.