National Champions of Nothing

Why Bama and Georgia fails to capture the imagination, plus a little announcement

A friend of mine and I have an on-again/off-again conversation about emotions on an airplane and how watching something at 30,000 feet usually gives it a whole new meaning. 

It’s sort of akin to how much better ice cream tastes (even the hospital kind) after surgery or how good a beer in a hot tub is as compared to just a regular beer.

His two best examples of this phenomenon are when the guy next to him in coach was watching Everybody Loves Raymond and laughing so hysterically that he couldn’t help but join. “It really was the funniest thing I’d ever seen, and yet, as soon as we got off the plane, I couldn’t tell you a single thing that happened or remember one joke.” 

Then, the ultimate: a viewing of Disney’s “The Rookie” in the middle of a trans-Atlantic flight JFK to Heathrow on the red-eye.

The Rookie is white-washed/based-on-a-true-story about Jim Morris—a middle-aged high school biology teacher, baseball coach, and one-time minor league pitching prospect—who somehow finds his fastball in his late-30s when all else seemed lost. 

It’s that sort of Saturday Night Fever/Good Will Hunting trope: a guy left for scrap in a go-nowhere town with do-nothing friends finds his special gift and propels himself, if only for the moment, into the stratosphere.

Dennis Quaid lovingly plays the main character, who, upon a recent view with my own kid, really drives home the fact that Men Who Succeed in movies like that really leave a trail of suffering—starting with their wives, followed by their children—in their wake. Great lessons to pass on. 

There is one part, however, my friend said brought him to tears somewhere over the endless black of the continental shelf. 

It was the phone call home once Our Hero learns he’s being called up to pitch in The Show. Maybe it’s carried by Quaid’s sneaky Texas grin, or maybe it’s more about the foundation laid by Australian actress Rachel Griffiths (The Wife) and pre-Succession Brian Cox (The Father) that made it resonate. We set our scene in the kitchen because, OF COURSE SHE’S IN THE KITCHEN forever chopping up something... 

Anyway, sometimes the emotions get charged up back here on Earth as well. I made a little announcement yesterday over on my other newsletter that I’m going to start work for sfgate.com next week as its new Central Coast contributing editor—trying as I might to cover a 240-mile stretch of coastline that starts in Monterey and ends somewhere around Rudy’s Fresh Mexican in Carpinteria. 

It’s my adopted home of the last decade-plus, the place where my little boy is growing up, and one of the most dramatic and strikingly beautiful pieces of planet, anywhere. The area is somewhat sparsely populated (as compared to the rest of the state) by hard-working folks who are also trying to find their way through the seemingly endless darkness of a time of pandemic and environmental and—with a little added luck—economic collapse. There is a lot to be told of this place, but for now, I’m enjoying the run-up, warming up in the bullpen, seeing if this old arm’s still got some zip. 

I’ll continue to write about sports and odds (and the defying of them) once a week, and I appreciate all the support that’s been given in the year (exactly!) since I started Even Money. 

Everyone’s comments (even the ones saying I was SO OFF betting on UCLA to go far in last year’s tournament in the nicest of ways) have meant the world to me. You’ve always been in the kitchen, keeping me going.

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Alabama vs. Georgia

If there were a bet on whether the ratings would fall through the floor for this national title game, it’d be a sure thing. 

Anyone outside the deep-and-abiding bowels of Football America South has been checked out of the sport for at least a month now. It’s no wonder. Covid having its way (once more), the economy being put on the backs of underpaid (and sick!) laborers, children being hospitalized, teachers unions asking for reasonable concessions during a slow-rolling mass death event, and getting actual pushback—all take center stage. 

And once again, we’re reminded we can’t have nice things like Big-Time College Football games when the whole of everything else is just a busted gum ball machine spread all over the floor and nobody at the ready with a broom.

So forgive the rest of us, the other 328.5-million plus, just a little bit, if we could GAF whether the Crimson Tide wins its seventh title in 13 seasons. 

The fact of the matter is, college football is a big-time resource suck in a system that favors exactly one team. For now, it should be a regional thing for two months, max. If there’s interest after that, perhaps a 32-team tournament that starts at the end of November and culminates with a final four and championship game the last week of the year—the deciding tilt to be held at the Rose Bowl, Cotton Bowl, Orange Bowl, etc. (rotating.)

Short of an actual solution, just declare conference champions the best around and let the (paid) student-athletes go back to school and the remainder of us can move on as well. 

By now, if you’re even impassively looking on, you’ll see that Georgia has lost seven straight against the Tide, including three Southeastern Conference championships and one national title game in that span. 

For their part, the Bulldogs have led down the stretch only to be shivved late in the fourth quarter or in overtime, every time. Close but not quite. 

Georgia coach Kirby Smart, a Nick Saban protege, won three championships with Alabama as defensive coordinator before taking over at Georgia in 2015. But here he is again looking up at his old mentor as the third seed as no. 1 ranked Alabama (13-1) will try to repeat in the national title game for the second time as the Bulldogs (also 13-1) will attempt to break the spell in the College Football Playoff National Championship game Monday evening in Indianapolis.

Surely Smart made some adjustments since the SEC title game where his team—which surrendered an average of six points during the regular season—gave up a whopping 41 to Alabama. The team that took the field and destroyed second-seeded Michigan in the Orange Bowl a week and a half ago surely looked like they’d gotten over their conference championship hiccup.

But Alabama remains a minor-league NFL juggernaut on both sides of the ball: fifth in the country in total offense (494.6 yards) and eighth in passing (336) while scoring just over 41 points per game. Heisman Trophy winner Bryce Young is third nationally with 4,503 passing yards and second with 46 touchdown tosses.

As good as Georgia is against Teams That Aren’t Bama, I’m not sure Smart can overcome his little brother complex on this one; his team’s all-around talent is a notch or two below the Crimson Tide’s. And as we’ve learned over (and over and over) the past five or so years, the bad guys have yet to crap out.

Take Alabama +2.5 and hope for something better in the future at the Dr. Pepper or Whatever National Football Championship Thing 5 p.m. PST Monday. Jan. 10