Looks like we have the two best teams – Clemson and Alabama. Clemson (14-1) came into the game ranked No. 1 with a flawless record.
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(AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin).
Monday’s game, at the University of Phoenix in Glendale, Arizona, pitted the winners of the semifinal games in the second College Football Playoff.
The college football world is still ruled by Alabama and Nick Saban. It needed all its talent and steely resolve.
Despite DeShaun Watson and Clemson amassing 550 yards against Alabama on Monday night, the national champion Crimson Tide finished the season with its best defensive numbers since 2012.
“We call it pop kick”, Saban said.
After Clemson responded with a field goal to trim the lead to 31-27, Bama’s Kenyan Drake scored on a remarkable 95-yard kickoff return to put the Crimson Tide ahead by two scores midway through the quarter.
Griffith surprise almost everyone with an onside kick that Marlon Humphrey recovered.
“You’ve got to focus on the next play and do what you have to do, to do your job (and) to help your team be successful”, he said. There were big plays galore from there to take the final score to Alabama 45, Clemson 40.
The Tigers pulled within four with a 31-yard field goal with 7:47 left.
MILITARY DISCIPLINE: Navy was assessed the fewest penalty yards per game for the third straight year and seventh time in eight seasons. Besides a 50-yard TD scamper (we’ll come back to it), Alabama’s Heisman-winning RB Derrick Henry averaged just 3.1 yards on 35 carries: he was mostly bottled up. Defensively, Alabama football yields 177.2 yards in passing and 124.4 yards in rushing, and allows 20.4 points per game. Clemson is searching for their first title since the 1980’s. Quarterback DeShaun Watson threw for 187 yards and one touchdown in 16 of 31 passes. Clemson’s onside kick went out of bounds.
Saban told him at the team hotel before the game they’d probably run the play.
“There weren’t many people earlier in the year who thought they could do it”, he said. Clemson CB Mackensie Alexander, who was nursing a hamstring injury, also started but left the game with 7:41 to go in the first half.
Watson set the Atlantic Coast Conference mark for total offense with 4,731 yards, 1,032 of those coming on the ground.
The Tide drove 42 yards on their next eight plays and watched Derrick Henry cap off the drive by diving into the end zone on a gain of one. “Two great teams. I’m sure it will be a great game”. “We’ve got to take all that into consideration”.
Instead, Saban and the Tide raised another trophy, its first in this new playoff system, and got another confetti shower. It is the Tide’s 11th national title in the poll era – 10 AP and one coaches’ poll – and more than any other school. Seven plays later, Henry tied the game at 14.
Alabama’s O.J. Howard tries to get past Clemson’s T.J. Green after a catch during the second half of the NCAA college football playoff championship game Monday, Jan. 11, 2016, in Glendale, Ariz.
But Coker hit Howard on a 63-yard catch-and-run that brought the ball to the Clemson 14.
It was a classic, full of big numbers, big plays and special moments that swung momentum in a game that went back and forth. Upper-level seats on the Clemson and Alabama sidelines are going for around $100. Since its one loss – in the third game of the season, losing to MS, 43-37 – Alabama has beaten every opponent (but one) by 13 points or more. Alabama blanked LSU for the next in 2011 and crushed Notre Dame to repeat in 2012. Remember the final score of that Georgia game?
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Roll Tide! Who is ready for #17?
