– Alabama’s defense led the first charge, their offense and special teams carried it from there as the Crimson Tide blew out the Michigan State Spartans 38-0 on their way to the national championship game against the Clemson Tigers. That can be achieved January 11 just outside Phoenix when the Crimson Tide meets Clemson for the College Football Playoff championship. Clemson defeated Oklahoma 37-17.
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It didn’t take long for Saban to get asked about Clemson.
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Only a shot at the fourth national title since 2009 and a shot to further solidify Saban’s place in college football history.
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The Spartans did a good job of bottling Henry, even as he scored two touchdowns, extending his touchdown streak to 19 games and giving him the Southeastern Conference single-season record with 25 scores. The senior didn’t try to do too much at first, but he took several well-timed shots down the field that proved effective.
“Walking in as a freshman, I would have never experienced or never expected to have an experience like this”, Cook said. “To see how he’s come along and become a great player with great work ethic, it’s what Amari Cooper had”. The Spartans were determined to stop Heisman Trophy running back Derrick Henry, so Kiffin dialed up play-action passes and took advantage of Michigan State putting its strong safety on a slot receiver. He caught eight passes for 138 yards. “Some of those plays, if the box was right, Derrick Henry would have got the ball”.
“Calvin did a great job of just getting up and making plays”, said Coker after the game. Scoring grabs of 50 and 6 yards by Ridley were sandwiched around cornerback Cyrus Jones’ 57-yard punt-return touchdown.
It still wasn’t as impressive as what Alabama did in a 38-0 win over Michigan State in the Cotton Bowl.
MI (10-3) had three touchdown drives of at least 70 yards and finished with 503 yards of offense against a Florida defense that entered the game ranked sixth nationally.
Alabama outgained Michigan State 440 yards to 239, and 286 of those were from the passing scheme.
In addition to the two interceptions, the Tide defense had four quarterback sacks and six tackles for loss. The way they play in the secondary their guys are very aggressive against the run, which is a good thing.
“The pass rush was there”, he said. He said his sore shoulder was fully healed and that he doesn’t need offseason surgery.
Cook, the winningest Michigan State QB at 34-5, was part of three of those, including MSU’s first Rose Bowl win since 1988, a 24-20 victory over Stanford.
Michigan State ran 26 times for 29 yards and spent most of the night stuck in the negatives.
MSU coach Mark Dantonio explained the difficulty in covering Ridley on deep passes when Alabama was effectively using play-action to freeze the linebackers and prevent them from re-rerouting the Alabama receiver.
We say attempted, of course, because it’s unclear if what Nick Saban does on the podium actually qualifies as dancing. Bama did what it wanted to do whenever it wanted to do it. On both sides of the ball. At the end of the first half, with Alabama beginning to overwhelm the MSU party goers with its 10-0 lead, Henry only had 39 yards on 11 carries. The former set up Henry’s 1-yard touchdown, with the latter leading to kicker Adam Griffith’s 47-yard field goal.
Wayne Gallman got the scoring started on the 1st drive of the half with a 1 yard touchdown to make it 23-17 Tigers.
The first quarter was nothing but punts.
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The big fellas, Robinson and Jarran Reed, even got to put Alabama on the board first. Those games represented the biggest cable TV audiences ever, until the first playoff championship game with Oregon-Ohio State topped it with 33 million viewers. In fact, Saban is now 9-0 against protégés, and has defeated Dantonio, his assistant at Michigan State in the late 1990s, by a combined 87-7 in two meetings.
