By halftime, with Alabama clearly unstoppable and cruising toward a perfect season, the mind began to wander toward an obvious question.
Has Nick Saban, the greatest coach in the history of college football, assembled the greatest team of them all?
Certainly, a case can be made for a group that breezed through a Southeastern Conference-only schedule in a pandemic-plagued season while barely breaking a sweat.
“I think we’re the best team to ever play,” quarterback Mac Jones said. “There’s no team that will ever play an SEC schedule like that. I’m so happy to win this game and kind of put the icing on the cake.”
Hold up, though.
It was only a year ago that LSU romped to the national title with a juggernaut of a team led by Heisman Trophy winner Joe Burrow and a horde of NFL-bound players.
Come to think of it, a case could also be made for the 2018 Clemson Tigers, thoroughly dominant as they became the first team ever to finish 15-0.
There’s something to be said for this era of superpower teams, with all their individual brilliance.
Without question, it was utterly thrilling to watch DeVonta Smith gliding past Ohio State’s befuddled defense, basically uncoverable as he turned in an MVP performance in only half a game.
But parity has left the building in college football, producing a rash of playoff blowouts that have, frankly, sucked all the drama out of the game’s grandest stage.
One could almost hear millions of homebound fans reaching for their remotes when the Crimson Tide trotted off the field in South Florida with an 18-point halftime lead.
By the time it mercifully ended, with Alabama celebrating a 52-24 rout of the Buckeyes, most of the nation had surely tuned out this Picasso of a performance by the crimson-clad bunch of future first-round picks.
Who could blame ‘em?
This script has become numbingly routine. No one has come within 17 points of the last three champions in the College Football Playoff. The average margin of their postseason triumphs was 25.3 points.
Last season, it was LSU that shredded Oklahoma 63-28 in the semifinals and crushed Clemson 42-25 in the title game.
The year before, it was the Tigers who set the standard: smoking Notre Dame 30-3 in the semis before a stunning 44-16 wipeout of Alabama in the national championship game.
Now comes the Crimson Tide (13-0), which endured just one game that was closer than 15 points and, amazingly, scored in all but two of 52 quarters over the course of the 2020-21 campaign.
Alabama coasted past Notre Dame 31-14 in the semifinals and was never seriously threatened Monday night, scoring on five of its first six possessions against an Ohio State defense that looked as though it couldn’t get enough players on the field.
