The advent of the 12-team College Football Playoff has kept more teams alive for the national championship nine weeks into the season than ever before, ostensibly. In actuality, there are still probably only a small handful of teams that could conceivably run the gauntlet through the playoff and come out the other side with a trophy.
To ESPN’s Bill Connelly, there are only four. And the Alabama Crimson Tide are one of them.
In Connelly’s weekly column coming out of Week 9, he named the four teams that, in his evaluation and statistical analysis, are “playing like potential national champions.” He included Ohio State, Indiana, Texas A&M, and Alabama, the top four teams in the country.
Alabama stayed in that group despite an upset scare in Columbia on Saturday, with South Carolina pushing the Crimson Tide to the brink. It took a surgical fourth-quarter drive by Ty Simpson and a heroic forced fumble by Deontae Lawson to secure the 29-22 victory over South Carolina, but Connelly is unfazed.
Billy Connelly isn’t downgrading Alabama after a close win at South Carolina
“Barely beating a two-touchdown underdog is a weird way of getting onto a "playing like a national champion" list, but I'm struggling to avoid feelings of inevitability here, both because of how many times in a row the Crimson Tide have made the exact plays they needed to make in the fourth quarter and because Kalen DeBoer's Washington Huskies basically did the exact same thing two years ago on the way to the national title game,” Connelly wrote.
Connelly extended the comparison’s to DeBoer Huskies team, which “won eight one-score games during a 14-game winning streak.” However, this Alabama compares favorably to the Huskies in terms of over talent, which could be the difference between winning and losing the final game of the season.
DeBoer’s 2023 Washington team, for all its late-game heroics and NFL talent, didn’t ultimately beat Michigan in the national championship game. That’s ultimately the reason that DeBoer had to come to Alabama, where he has access to the resources and recruiting grounds that can build a title-winning roster.
Connelly continued, “Granted, DeBoer's Huskies lost in 2023's title game, but they lost to a Michigan team that ranked 12 spots higher than them on 247 Sports' Talent Composite. The only team that ranks higher than Alabama in this year's Talent Composite is Georgia, a team the Tide have already beaten. This team knows how to see games out and won't face many matchup disadvantages in any hypothetical CFP matchup. That's a pretty scary combination, isn't it?”