Alabama's win over Georgia in the SEC title game has set up a national-championship matchup for the ages.
Here's how I feel about Alabama playing Notre Dame for the national college football championship:
You're dining at a restaurant—a pretty good restaurant—and you've had the bread and the fancy olives and the beet salad (again!), and the lamb chops were tasty and substantial, and there were also a few handfuls of sweet-potato fries off of somebody else's plate, and you know you should call it a night, when the waiter appears at the table and asks, calmly but firmly, if anyone would care for dessert. And before you have time to say no, the waiter is ticking off the establishment's desserts, the last of which is an astonishing confection called The Sinful Devil's Deep-Fried Doughnut Straight-to-Rehab Sugar Bender. And The Sinful Devil's Deep-Fried Doughnut Straight-to-Rehab Sugar Bender is something in which handmade doughnuts are deep-fried by sugar elves in a sugar barrel, then wrapped in a chocolate mattress and baked into the floorboards of a gingerbread house, where they rest for a thousand years until they are excavated and bathed anew in honey and butter and sugar. Somewhere along the way, a chocolate truffle, a peanut-butter cup and a wheelbarrow of whipped cream join the party. And this dessert sounds at once like the best thing you've ever heard of and also totally insane, but before you can resist and offer a meek, No, that's OK, we'll take the check, someone else at the table interrupts and announces, "Sounds amazing. We'll take five."
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That's how I feel about the Crimson Tide facing the Fighting Irish for the national championship. It's delicious and too much. Power versus power, legends atop legends, history upon history, with big ladles of obnoxiousness and hysteria. I fear it and can't wait at the same time. Alabama vs. Notre Dame is the The Sinful Devil's Deep-Fried Doughnut Straight-to-Rehab Sugar Bender. À la mode.
Notre Dame was already in this game. Alabama got in Saturday by beating Georgia in the Southeastern Conference championship game in Atlanta. Georgia almost won, but in the closing minutes of the contest, the Bulldogs fell under the impression they were playing a leisurely game of Ultimate Frisbee, and time ran out before they had a chance to score and ruin everything. I know everybody feels bad for Georgia, and Georgia played great, but those Bulldogs were messing around with the desired narrative. The Crimson Tide versus the Fighting Irish was the dreamy matchup (non-Georgia football-loving) people wanted to see. Sorry. That fact is both annoying and true.
And so now here it comes, on Jan. 7, in a concrete pit in Miami Gardens, Fla., where the NFL Dolphins play something that swings wildly between football and running around the backyard with plastic mop buckets on their heads. I am going to spare you the rant in which I howl that this Notre Dame-Alabama game, like every big college-football bowl, should really be happening on New Year's Day, and not a week later, on a Monday, like a PTA meeting. College football long ago sold the remaining threads of its soul to television and they have quite nearly ruined the whole thing under a tacky pile of sponsorship and a BCS system which makes sense to about 2.7 humans. The coming playoff system will only drive everyone battier. Just wait.
This year, however, there's not a ton of confusion. Notre Dame is ranked No. 1. Alabama is No. 2. I know Ohio State fans are cranky because the on-probation Buckeyes finished undefeated but postseason ineligible, and I will agree to be as sad as I can possibly be for an institution under the aegis of Urban Meyer. Ohio State advocates are now sentenced to a long life of cocktail parties in which they will overhear people talking about the hallowed national-championship game between Alabama and Notre Dame, and feel obligated to jump in to remind everyone of the underappreciated 12-0 Buckeyes, who could have beaten either, except for some lame-o NCAA sanction involving a tattoo parlor. And then the Notre Dame-Alabama fans will say, "Yeah but Ohio State gave up 49 points to an Indiana team that finished 4-8" and then the Buckeye fan will claim Notre Dame got lucky versus Pittsburgh and note that Bama lost to Texas A&M and the whole thing will go around and around and sound as tedious 40 years from now as it does today.
Alabama and Notre Dame is what we get, and it's not a bad get. Two schools with 25 claimed national championships between them. The Irish and Tide have met only six times in their histories, with Notre Dame winning five. And the legends! There are enough football ghosts between these institutions to produce an epic paranormal event, and be assured that in the coming weeks you will be rendered numb by all of the misty, water-colored memories getting pumped out of South Bend and Tuscaloosa.
I give Alabama a slight edge on the Insufferable Index, not because of its excellent team, but because it plays in the SEC. Half of the pleasure of watching SEC football, it seems, is reminding everyone else how good SEC football is, and, by extension, how bad everyone who doesn't play in the SEC is. There's real truth to the strength of the conference (the SEC has produced college football's last six national champions) but after a while, all that talk about SEC superiority and "big-man football" becomes repetitive and a little unbearable, like the guy who stops by your desk every Monday morning, does unsolicited calf stretches in his khakis and talks about the awesome half-marathon he ran over the weekend. I get it. You guys rule. Please stop.
It's inevitable that this title game will be presented as a referendum on How Good Notre Dame Actually Is. Alabama has won two of the last three national championships, and Notre Dame is the recovery act with something to prove, and you could fuel a rocket to Mars with all of the underestimation of the Fighting Irish. That's fine. That's OK. We will find out soon enough. Alabama and Notre Dame are playing for everything. The Sinful Devil's Deep-Fried Doughnut Straight-to-Rehab Sugar Bender is in the oven. It's ridiculous but irresistible. You probably should take a couple of brisk laps around the block.
Write to Jason Gay at Jason.Gay@wsj.com
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