NO ALABAMA, NO CLEMSON — AND COLLEGE FOOTBALL SHOULD BE THRILLED

Fatigue over Nick Saban and Dabo Swinney set in long ago, so let’s celebrate new blood and the uncustomary fadeout of two programs that have dominated the playoff system throughout its eight seasons

     Nick Saban always will have his statue. Dabo Swinney always will have his positivity pulpit. But as both have noticed, college football is aswirl in the whipping winds of a revolution. Players can be paid millions without a booster furtively stuffing a cash envelope into a shoe. The transfer portal allows free agency for impressionable, restless kids with dreams.

     So why wouldn’t this multiple-vortex storm blow away the two brands that have dominated the sport — ad nauseam — in the first eight years of the four-team College Football Playoff? I am bored with the same Alabama uniforms with numbers on the helmets, worn back when Bear Bryant was the icon-in-residence and Steely Dan was lyricizing, “They call Alabama the Crimson Tide, call me Deacon Blues.” I am tired of the white paws on the orange Clemson helmets. This is not at all intended to slight their extensive glories — in those eight seasons, Alabama has won three national titles and reached the CFP seven times under Saban, while Clemson has claimed two national titles and reached the CFP six times under Swinney.

     Wonderful. Have a Chick-fil-A sandwich on me. St. Nick is the greatest coach ever in his sport, winner of seven championships. Preacherman Dabo eventually can succeed him in Tuscaloosa, unless he takes the bait of the Carolina Panthers or another NFL sucker daring to hire a BMOC. Still, the essence of any sport is mined from the story lines, the narratives — “the stuff,” as an editor of mine liked to grumble, as in, “Where’s the damned stuff?” And if college football is changing furiously, we should celebrate heartily that this likely will be the first CFP without Alabama or Clemson. We need new stuff, and, finally, thankfully, it is upon us. Can you say TCU? Can you keep playing alphabet soup and spell USC? Even Tennessee, lost for decades in scandals and Rocky Top foolishness, remains in sight.

     Nothing in the world is perpetual, not even the religion of Southern-drawl football. Saban always knew Georgia had the resources and local recruiting tonnage to ultimately supplant his program if the proper coach was summoned. Sure enough, once his most valued disciple fled to Athens, Kirby Smart maximized every built-in advantage. The Bulldogs toppled Alabama for the national title last season and are favored to win another, if not another next season and the year after. Georgia is the new Alabama. Except Smart — borrowing from Saban’s “rat poison” concerns when his team is overly praised — refuses to let his players swagger while convincing them that imaginary critics of the program are real.

     “I would say we definitely had much more of a chip on our shoulder this game,” cornerback Kelee Ringo said after a beatdown of Tennessee. “We just wanted to prove the entire nation wrong. No matter what the media says, or what anybody else says about us, we have confidence in ourselves and we know what we’re capable of. Obviously those people who are saying those things don’t know what we’re doing.”

     Why oh why would a program that has won 27 of its last 28 games have anything to prove? What are these supposed critics missing? “That we are who we say we are,” Ringo said. “The University of Georgia is capable of doing big things.”

     I haven’t heard someone named Ringo say anything so goofy since the Beatles drummer. But that’s what happens when Smart, a quarter-century younger than Saban at 46, downplays his budding dynasty on practice fields every day. Last week, anybody walking past the complex heard the coach screaming at his defensive players on a bullhorn. Naturally, someone filmed a video that went viral.

     “All this finger-pointing bullshit!” Smart scolded them. “Every other team in America, you know what they do? They say, ‘It's his fault! It's his fault! It's his fault!' Why do (the opponents) get free layups? It's because they don't f---ing concentrate!”

     Days later, Smart was praising his defense for concentrating enough to force six sacks of quarterback Hendon Hooker, who had entered the game as a leading Heisman Trophy winner and point man of a Tennessee offense averaging almost 50 points a game. “Going into the game, what did we say we were not gonna do? We're not giving layups," said Smart, continuing the basketball analogy after a 27-13 victory that wasn’t remotely that close. “If they go in for a layup, we're fouling them. We're not giving layups, and we stayed away from the layups. If you make it hard and complicated, you can't (run an offense) fast enough. Nowhere to run, nowhere to hide. That was our theme. We told them we wanted to play them right in our box.”

     It’s safe to say no team will invade Georgia’s box this season without a mauling. A defense that lost eight starters to the NFL simply reloaded, accompanied by the increasingly potent passing arm and leadership of once-doubted, now-dauntless Stetson Bennett IV. The opponent next month in the SEC title game, Alabama’s annual domain, probably will be LSU. For all the good work Brian Kelly has done so far for his $100 million in Baton Rouge — such as ditching the fake Cajun accent — his best deed was going for a two-point conversion Saturday night in Death Valley and burying St. Nick. Kelly spilled tears, but the more poignant scene came in the post-game interview room, where Saban … blamed himself!

     And rightly so. Known for demanding preparation and airtight execution, Alabama has suffered too many defensive lapses and ranks last in the SEC in takeaways and penalty yards per game. Sometimes, you wonder if Saban has been kidnapped and replaced by a lookalike imposter. His team was a runaway preseason favorite to win another national title. Bryce Young, soon to join predecessors Tua Tagovailoa and Jalen Hurts as ascendant QB1s on the next level, was back to defend his Heisman Trophy. Jahmyr Gibbs and Eli Ricks were arriving for stardom from the transfer portal. What possibly could go wrong? Saban went wrong. He mismanaged the clock at the end of a loss to Tennessee and, before Kelly clicked on his two-point whim, went for double, ill-fated two-point conversions in regulation.

     “Look, I can’t blame the players. I’m responsible for all this stuff. If we didn’t do it right, that’s on me,’’ Saban said after the 32-31 loss. “It would be an understatement to say how disappointed our team is. Sometimes, we beat ourselves too much and it’s kind of hard to overcome.”

     The team’s defensive leader, linebacker Will Anderson Jr., was vocal that the players weren’t to blame. “I'm super proud of all those guys because Monday through Friday we work our asses off,” he said. “There's no bullshit, and all those guys are locked in. Effort is not the issue.” Here we thought Alabama would benefit wildly from the NIL era and roll to more titles, but while USC has cashed in to rise from the dead, Saban hasn’t been the same since he was called out by his friend-turned-enemy, Jimbo Fisher. After saying Fisher and Texas A&M “bought every player” in a top-ranked 2022 recruiting class, Saban caught holy hell from Fisher, who said “we never bought anybody” while accusing St. Nick of being a crook.

     “It's despicable that a reputable head coach can come out and say this when he doesn't get his way," Fisher said. “The narcissist in him doesn't allow those things to happen. It's ridiculous when he's not on top. … Some people think they're God. Go dig into how God did his deal. You may find out ... a lot of things you don't want to know. We build him up to be the czar of football. Go dig into his past, or anybody's that's ever coached with him. You can find out anything you want to find out, what he does and how he does it. It's despicable.”

     Who knew “God” would respond by shriveling up and missing the playoff? Then again, Fisher is 3-6 after a five-game losing streak and sits sixth in the SEC West. Monday, the second-rated linebacker in the 2023 recruiting class, Anthony Hill Jr., de-committed from Texas A&M. He’ll visit Texas, another NIL hot spot, as incoming Arch Manning knows. The lesson: You can throw money at great high-school talent, but you still have to coach them up. Smart is doing that. Saban is not.

     To challenge Georgia, much less win, LSU must concoct a miracle that Kelly couldn’t find in big games at Notre Dame. Same goes for Ohio State, Michigan, TCU, Tennessee, USC, Oregon or another team that slips into the national semifinals. To project ahead a month, Georgia should be joined in the final four by the winner of a Michigan-Ohio State blood war. If TCU and its explosive offense steer past challenges at Texas and Baylor and win the Big 12 title game, Sonny Dykes and the Horned Frogs — has anyone ever seen a horned frog? — are the third team in. I’m thinking the CFP selection committee, whose members order out pizza and sit around in pajamas, will look hard at the conference-realignment-forgotten Pac-12 if USC, Oregon or UCLA sweep remaining games against each other. Tennessee will complain, but no one wants to see a Georgia-Rocky Top rematch. The Ohio State-Michigan loser will yelp, but the committee prefers conference champions.

     And Clemson will shriek. In truth, this is a program in decline that never should have been in the CFP conversation. Our sincere thanks are extended to unranked Notre Dame and the embattled head coach, Marcus Freeman, for exposing a fraud in a 35-14 rout. Since absorbing a 49-28 blowout in the CFP semis two years ago, courtesy of Ohio State, Swinney has struggled to develop a quarterback worthy of the Trevor Lawrence/Deshaun Watson lineage. DJ Uiagalelei was benched again in South Bend, leaving Dabo in emotional tatters.

     “This was an ass-kicking, period," he said. “That's what it is. Just flat-out got our tails handed to us. That's unfortunate. It hasn't happened a lot, but it's happened a few times along the way. We've handed out a bunch of them, too. Tonight, we were the bug. We got the bad end of that deal, and we deserved every second of it.”

     Guess what else happened? Like Saban, Dabo accepted the critical swarm. “This was a really bad day and all the criticism was warranted and just should be directed at me, period,” he said. “This is one of the most disappointing days that I've had as a head coach.”

     With Clemson in realignment limbo, stuck in ACC no-man’s land, don’t be surprised if Swinney finds an escape hatch. Saban isn’t going anywhere — hell, he’s already plotting for 2023 revenge — but we are in no rush to see him in January anytime soon.

     This is a time to enjoy the new narratives. I could like Georgia and USC in one semifinal. I could embrace Michigan and TCU in the other semifinal, since I’m as sick of Ohio State as I am of Alabama and Clemson. I could dig Smart and Jim Harbaugh, at each other’s throats in the championship game, in a $6 billion palace somewhere near Hollywood.

      There’s your “damned stuff,” boss.

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     Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host. Living in Los Angeles, he gravitated by osmosis to film projects.