Monday, January 8, 2018

And now, that other title game

The College Football Playoff National Championship Game Everywhere But The University of Central Florida is tonight, and so I suppose it's incumbent upon the Blob to pick a winner, even though the Blob doesn't especially care who wins, or even care particularly about watching it.

(This process is helped along by the fact the Blob cast itself into the non-cable wilderness a few years back. So, no ESPN, which is televising the game. The Blob may venture out somewhere to watch it, o it may not. We shall see.)

Anyway ... it's Georgia, it's Alabama, it's a clash of SEC titans. This is great unless you live outside the southeastern United States, and realize Georgia and Alabama are the only titans the SEC had this year. In that case it's just another SEC game.

The Blob's prediction: 'Bama wins. And I suspect in much the way it beat Clemson in the semifinals.

Which is to say, thoroughly.

The Blob could be wrong, because it frequently is. ("Wow, there's a news flash!" you're saying.) But I like Alabama for several reasons, starting with the coaching matchup. It's Nick Saban vs. his clone, Kirby Smart, and that means there isn't much Smart's gonna throw at his mentor that the mentor hasn't himself diagrammed 500,000 times. So there's not much element of surprise here.

Throw in the fact that it's a quarterback who's been on this stage before (Alabama's Jalen Hurts) vs. a quarterback who hasn't been (Georgia true freshman Jake Fromm). Also throw in the fact that Fromm is exactly the sort of pocket passer against which Alabama tends to thrive, and not the sort of multiple-dimension talent (i.e., Deshaun Watson, Johnny Manziel) against which it occasionally struggles.

This means Georgia's going to have to run the football to have any chance at winning, and with its two-headed monster -- Sony Michel and Nick Chubb -- that's certainly possible. But Alabama stuffs the run as well as anyone in the country, so it may not be as possible as you think.

Of course, after Michel and Chubb combine for about 250 yards tonight, the aforementioned is going to sound incredibly stupid. But the Blob's willing to risk it, because sounding incredibly stupid is not exactly foreign territory for it.

And so: 'Bama. And probably easier than ESPN would like.

The floor opens for post-mortem ridicule around midnight.

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