Alabama-LSU, And The Delights Of Anti-Modern Football

Four years removed from college football's most recent Game of the Century, I still have no idea what the hell to make of it. This is a game that does not possess a catchy nickname, because it had few catches at all; it is a game that most people would rather purge from their memory banks, because it turned out to be that rare exacta of plodding and inconsequential.

The most exciting play in LSU's 9-6 victory over Alabama that season was a 72-yard-punt by a dingbatty Australian named Brad Wing. It was a game in which the winning team—with Odell Beckham at wideout!—passed for 94 yards, and a game that brutally murdered its own attendant hype. It was arguably the nadir of the Bowl Championship series, because the teams wound up meeting a couple of months later in a national championship game rematch that proved even more toothless than its predecessor. And yet there's something about that game that fascinates me to this day, because four years on, I'm not sure how many high-level games like that we're ever going to see like that again.

This is all relevant, of course, because No. 2 LSU plays at No. 4 Alabama on Saturday. This has become the signature rivalry in the Southeastern Conference, if not all of college football. Here we have two teams that cling to the notion of playing pro-style offense in a spread-happy universe; here we have two teams that have managed, year after year, to pull in some of the best defenders and running backs in the country, and which are perfectly content to have them engage in vicious collisions. In many ways, LSU and Alabama are sylistic siblings, with the notable exception being that their head coaches, Les Miles and Nick Saban, are the Matthau and Lemmon of their era. And this is what sets LSU and Alabama apart from every other rivalry in existence at the moment: Whenever they meet up, both teams are purposefully defying football modernism.

I'm not going to lie: I love watching the spread offense proliferate. There is something wonderfully ostentatious about the way Big 12 games unfold these days—the perverse and beautiful way in which Baylor manages to produce truckloads of touchdowns week after week, the way TCU manages to outscore opponents while playing with a depleted defense, the way Oklahoma State rains down buckets of points from the sky. I like that college football is more wide-open than it has ever been, and I like that the spread is now sophisticated enough that it can produce iterations within iterations. I have no problem with the way Baylor and TCU play football; I thought perhaps Ole Miss had finally mastered its own high-octane offense to the point that it might have eclipsed both Alabama and LSU this season. But any presumption about the imminent death of the old-school SEC appears pretty profoundly wrong.

I mean, was there a more apt metaphor for the conservative wing of the SEC than this wildly proliferating meme-button urging Lane Kiffin to stop fucking around with that fancy-pants shit and start running the damn football? And I know what you're going to say: You're going to tell me that actually, Alabama has thrown the football a respectable amount this season, that the Crimson Tide are in fact around the middle of the SEC pack this year when it comes to passing offense. All true.

But really, how do you think things are going to unfold on Saturday? Do you really believe Alabama's Saban, if he can at all help it, is going to allow this game to be put in the hands of quarterback Jake Coker, rather than sculpted tailback Derrick Henry? (I mean, look at this photo of Saban and Derrick Henry and tell me that isn't a throwback in itself; strike the background images and it's essentially a Richard Avedon portrait.) And on the other side, do you really think Les Miles is going to allow anyone but Leonard Fournette—the most un-tacklable running back in college football since Bo leapt over the top—to dictate the tenor of this game?

That's what we're in for, I think. Lots of short bursts into traffic, lots of contact, lots of overzealous color commentators proclaiming this, as Miles once did, "big-boy football." That's a stupid and condescending way of putting it, of course, akin to NFL personnel thumbing their noses at the supposed lack of physicality and sophistication in the college game because it doesn't adhere to their stereotypes. What Baylor plays is as much "big-boy football" as anything else, and just because it doesn't involve the same amount of potentially crippling head trauma doesn't make it any less so. And that underlying concern is why I think the spread is probably where football is headed; a game that's more wide-open may be football's only stylistic hope for self-preservation.

But for now, LSU-Alabama is what we have. And it's not unfathomable to imagine another 9-6 finish, another game defined by punting and by straight-ahead running and rampant conservatism. "I think the spread offense is a tremendous way to move the football. I have no problem with it whatsoever," Miles said this week. "But we enjoy the fact that there is a physicality to the offense that we run, that we're going to challenge a defense and try to control the line of scrimmage and block them. And it's not necessarily a pass-only event, and I think that that's how our offense is built. I think we'll stay there."

It's worth noting that Miles turns 62 next week; Saban turned 64 on Halloween. I don't know how much longer we'll have this rivalry in its current iteration. At some point, things might change; at some point, things might have to change. So let us savor the way these offenses are built. Let us embrace 9-6 before it's swept away forever.