I was going to write a preview of the College Football Playoff but I realized that was fruitless.
Alabama should overwhelm Washington. Ohio State and Clemson will be a classic matchup of strength on strength. Alabama will be a heavy favorite against either team in the championship. Voila. Those three sentences you'll hear verbatim and repeatedly on ESPN in the network's pregame coverage.
Instead, I need to take some time and focus on a more dystopian theory requiring a deep dive down the rabbit hole. It's a ludicrous premise on its surface. It's a potential reality we need to acknowledge for the sake of a conference that adamantly, yet somewhat creepily, claims collegiate sports just mean more to its institutions before it's too late for its most holy spectacle. Alabama football has been called the Death Star by many writers. I don't think that metaphor goes far enough, though. The Death Star was so poorly designed it got blown up. Multiple times. What do I believe Nick Saban has accomplished at Alabama?
I adamantly believe Nick Saban is the mastermind of a plan where he has built the SEC into his own entity in the model of the titular amusement park at the helm of HBO's new hit series, Westworld.
For those unfamiliar with the show, here's a synopsis. Thanks to technological advancements, an escape from the real world has been created in the form of an amusement park called Westworld. The park is inhabited by hosts, artificial intelligence beings with tremendous human-like behavior who all play a role in a larger picture. Wealthy, powerful humans are able to come into Westworld to live out their wildest fantasies in this replica of the wild west. Here's the thing, though. The hosts have no ability to fight back. The elite humans always win and get what they want. The park's creator is an old man who strives to make these stories increasingly compelling with a relentless pursuit of perfection, and the hosts are reprogrammed or thrown aside like scraps should they malfunction and go off script. For the sake of spoilers, I won't go into some of the deeper and darker themes of the show, but this should be enough to make my case.
In this analogy, Alabama's highly touted recruits and football players are the humans. Nick Saban plays the role of Dr. Robert Ford, creator of the park and mass manipulator of each and every host. The hosts in this case? The individuals who make up the thirteen other programs in the SEC.
Look at the current state of the SEC. Besides Alabama, this season was disastrous for the conference. No team besides the Crimson Tide will finish with double digit wins. The quarterbacks in the conference are wildly inconsistent and incompetent. Successful coaches have been replaced with Saban disciples struggling to replicate the results of their predecessors. Is Alabama's head coach really responsible for all this? Look at this list of events in the conference this year and decide for yourself:
-Georgia fires head coach Mark Richt. His almost annually double digit win totals obviously weren't enough. LSU fires head coach Les Miles. His almost annually double digit wins totals obviously weren't enough. Angered at the programs' desires to better challenge him, the replacements have results that inspire no confidence in an effort to inflict losing on the "humans"...
-Florida and LSU have athletes on defense to threaten the Crimson Tide's offense. However, the programs have Purdue transfers at the game's most important position. I wonder who is preventing the schools from recruiting competent players in the most crucial role on the field. Seems like a new and damning flaw in the code of these once championship caliber programs...
-Tennessee, thanks to miraculous comebacks in the second half, seems poised to usurp Florida, led by former Saban assistant Jim McIlwain, as SEC East champions. Knowing he needs a team to rush for zero yards in the SEC Championship game to finish a story declaring this iteration of the Tide as the sport's best ever, former Saban player Alvin Kamara convinces Jalen Hurd to leave the program sending the team into turmoil down the stretch guaranteeing a Gator appearance. Even Nick Saban needs a servant as loyal as Bernard Lowe...
-Johnny Manziel was responsible for one of the most exciting victories against the Crimson Tide in recent memory. Now, his life is falling apart. Is it really all self-inflicted or did Saban seek revenge and alter his attributes to make the former Heisman trophy winner go off the deep end...
-Texas A&M surprisingly showed up at #4 in the College Football Playoff rankings. The Aggies, though, fall apart losing to Ole Miss, Mississippi State, and LSU in November. Why? The core component of the Aggies' story is finishing with this record...
-Auburn looks lifeless for much of the season. Not wanting to destroy the collective conscience of a crucial group of hosts, he lets the Tigers turn it around with a vaunted ground game as the season goes on. But when it's time for the Iron Bowl, it's a huge break the team's star running back is injured...
-In September, Ole Miss quarterback Chad Kelly scores 42 points on the Crimson Tide in a hard fought defeat. Last year, he led the Rebels to a victory in Tuscaloosa. Why did his season end with a knee injury. I assume we'll never know for certain...
-Arkansas racks up 30 points against the best defense in college football history(?). Infuriated by the disrespect shown, Arkansas struggles with inconsistency the rest of the season and blows massive halftime leads in the final two games of the season. A star player gets caught shoplifting at the namesake store for the Razorbacks' bowl game adding further insult to reputation. A coincidence? I think not...
-Mississippi State, high on pride for the success of Dak Prescott, seems poised to get a boost in recruiting. After a 6-7 season, though, the likelihood of that seems far fetched now. Unable to control the NFL, Saban takes the proper measure in his world to keep a possible threat as a constant loser...
-Poor Vanderbilt finally seems to be figuring out how to form a respectable football team. However, a big time job in the Big Ten opens up. Instead of staying around Nashville, James Franklin heads to Penn State where he wins the conference this year. Awfully convenient such a sharp football mind left the team for greener pastures...
Spooky, right? I could go on with more evidence, but I'd like you to encourage you to do some of your own.
Alabama's rise to a juggernaut has coincided with a return to mediocrity- or worse- by other teams in the conference during Saban's tenure. The former is directly the results of his efforts. The evidence for the latter is piling up to a level it makes me believe he's simultaneously architecting the respective demises of football programs across the Southeastern United States.
Nick Saban has created a conference full of violent delights for his team. There's no indication at all violent ends await the Crimson Tide any time soon.
J. Nave
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