Alabama Football: Numbers don’t lie, Tide wins the most against the best

Offseasons are filled with data – about Alabama Football and every other top, or up-trending college football program. Almost all the data is of some interest. Some of it stands out as more compelling.

Take the recent tweet below. It shows the records of nine ‘top’ teams versus AP Poll, Top 25 teams.

Alabama football fans will enjoy the compiled performance going back to the 2011 season. Georgia fans may not like the data and discount it on an argument, what happened in 2011 and 2012 does not accurately reflect the strength of the Bulldogs’ program today.

That is a fair complaint. No doubt Georgia fans would prefer the same analysis applied to just the 2020 and 2021 seasons. A two-season (even a three-season) sample is not large enough to have merit.

Seeking to have a minimum acceptable sample size, the same calculation was done beginning with the 2015 season through the 2021 season.

The results are illuminating.

Note: Only eight of the nine teams above were compared, deleting Stanford because of recent poor performance.

Going back to the 2015 season, three teams have lost the fewest games against Top 25 opponents. Those teams are the Alabama Crimson Tide, Ohio State Buckeyes and the Clemson Tigers with seven losses each. The Oklahoma Sooners have eight losses.

Oklahoma State has 13, Top 25 losses; LSU and Georgia have 14 and Oregon has 15.

The eight teams ranked by winning percentage.

• Alabama Crimson Tide – 85.4%
• Ohio State Buckeyes – 80%
• Clemson Tigers – 77.4%
• Oklahoma Sooners – 76.5%
• LSU Bengal Tigers – 62.2%
• Georgia Bulldogs – 61.1%
• Oklahoma State Cowboys – 60.6%
• Oregon Ducks – 40%

It is worthwhile to remember, the LSU winning percentage against Top 25 teams would be lower, if not for the outlier season of 2019, when LSU was 7-0 against the Top 25.

About a week ago, we stirred some feathers by stating the history of the CFB Playoffs has shown, that in any season, a maximum of six teams are real contenders to win a National Championship. Usually, the number is less, sometimes not as many as four.

The winning percentages against Top 25 teams, shown above, reinforce that contention.

Another Data Point shows Alabama Football Dominance

During the 2015-2021 seasons, Alabama Football played 48 games against Top 25 teams. The team playing the next most was LSU at 37 games, followed by Georgia at 36, Ohio State at 35, Oklahoma at 34 and Oklahoma State at 33.

Well behind, in Top 25 games, were Clemson with 31 and the Oregon Ducks with 25.

The only reasonable conclusion is the Alabama Crimson Tide plays more games against top competition and has the greatest success while doing it.

Note: Team records for the 2015 – 2021 seasons were retrieved from Sports Reference. Games against Top 25 teams were based on AP Poll rankings going into each game – not end-of-season AP rankings.