For all their differences, seasons for Alabama and Cincinnati played out in similar fashion
DALLAS – The topic Thursday morning was how college football’s Dumbledore coached a young Alabama team that expected success without understanding how to achieve it. The Crimson Tide didn’t comprehend how to play championship-level football until the 13th game. A veteran coach’s fingers can get awfully tired trying to push the right buttons.
Nick Saban, was this a test of your patience?
“I don’t have any patience,” Saban said, “so anything that happens is a test of my patience.” A smile began to soften his harrumph. “Including sitting in this chair right now.”
Saban is old school, from the coat and tie he wore to a Zoom news conference for the Cotton Bowl Classic to his insistence that his talented players cut no corners. Alabama is old school. Alabama being No. 1 is, if not old school, at least old hat. No. 4 Cincinnati is an old school (1870) but, in the football elite, decidedly not old school.
For all the differences that the Crimson Tide and the Bearcats have in history, pedigree and outside expectations, they share a similar profile in how their 2021 seasons unfolded. They went into Week One with outside, outsized demands of success. Their knees buckled —Alabama losing at Texas A&M in October, and struggling to beat LSU, Arkansas and Auburn in November; Cincinnati struggling to put away Navy and Tulane, and needing a goal-line stand to beat Tulsa. And now they are here, waiting for the clock to do its interminable business before kickoff at 3:40 p.m. Eastern time Friday.
Saban knows how to coach a defending national champion. This is the seventh time he’s done it. (Think about that for a second.) He built into his season game plan the expectation of entitlement.
“This is part of the human condition,” Saban said. “When you have success, you want to be rewarded. You want to relax. You can be a little complacent. I don’t think it was unusual from that standpoint. … But because we were young, I think it took this team a little longer to maybe respond on a consistent basis like we wanted them to.”
Alabama didn’t find that hunger until Las Vegas made the Crimson Tide an underdog to undefeated Georgia in the SEC Championship Game. The Tide dominated the Dawgs 41-24. We all assume that Alabama will pick up where it left off in Atlanta.
“I’m pretty sure we’re still probably getting disrespected out there,” sophomore linebacker Will Anderson Jr. said this week. You can’t find that disrespect with a thousand Googles, but when the All-American, Nagurski Award-winning defensive leader says he still feels like his team is an underdog, that indicates a laser-like focus.
The Crimson Tide will need such focus to beat the Bearcats, who have a defense that ranks in the national top 10 in six categories, and who have a roster with more than 30 seniors. Cincinnati may have a coach in only his sixth season, including the one a decade ago as interim coach at Ohio State, but Luke Fickell won two national championship rings as a Buckeyes assistant.
“We’ve been on some of those stages,” Fickell said of his team. “I’m not saying we’ve been on a Cotton Bowl stage like this, in the playoffs. But playing at Notre Dame this year (a 24-13 Bearcats victory) was big for us, handling just all the hype around it, and even the environment and atmosphere going into that game.
“I think our ability to handle that, grow through that, through some of the other things, the ups and the downs we had in that middle part of the season, just happened to handle the expectations, just happened to handle not playing quite maybe up to the standard of what not only we thought, but what people outside of us thought. A lot of those things are a buildup for where we are today. Hopefully we’ll be able to draw upon all those things to help us here [Friday] afternoon.”
Fickell grew up in Columbus, played at Ohio State and coached there for 17 seasons. He was a sophomore at St. Francis DeSales High School in 1990 when another Columbus native, Buster Douglas, a 42-to-1 underdog, upset the unbeatable Mike Tyson to win the world heavyweight boxing championship.
Cincinnati is merely a two-touchdown underdog, but Alabama hasn’t prepared as casually as Iron Mike did. Finding someone who thinks Cincinnati will win will take a thousand Googles and a few bloodhounds. Alabama has more good players, and the Tide has proven it doesn’t flinch when hit in the jaw. That quality will come in handy Friday at AT&T Stadium.