LSU-Alabama shows how football is evolving

For people who started paying attention to college football in 2013 or later, this piece on the weekend’s huge game between the #1 LSU Tigers and the #2 Alabama Crimson Tide will provide a lot of new information.

People who have followed the sport already know this, but anyone who is relatively new to college football deserves to get an understanding of why this weekend’s game is significant in ways which transcend the immediate stakes.

Yes, this game is for the SEC West Division title and a berth in the SEC Championship Game on December 7, most likely against the Georgia Bulldogs.

Yes, this game will likely put the winner in the College Football Playoff, probably in the Peach Bowl. (The Peach Bowl, like the SEC Championship Game, is played in Atlanta, which is geographically close to both LSU and Alabama. The other playoff semi-final, the Fiesta Bowl, is played in Glendale, Arizona, which would mean a long commute for a team from the Southeastern United States.)

Yet, those stakes don’t represent the full magnitude of this game. LSU-Alabama 2019 marks a moment of evolution in college football, and more precisely, Southern football.

It wasn’t like this the last time LSU and Alabama played a regular-season game of enormous importance.

On November 5, 2011, #1 LSU played #2 Alabama.

The winner was going to play for the national championship. It was a meeting on the mountaintop of the two best teams in that given season.

That night’s game was familiar to Southern football fans in the United States. It was the embodiment of college football as fathers and grandfathers had passed it down to their children. This was football as something close to a rugby match, a violent and brutal turf battle in which gaining field position and displaying physical dominance were the most important aspects of the competition.

Old-school football coaches who embraced long-established methods and principles would always preach about eliminating mistakes, establishing field position, and being sound in the kicking game (which generally referred to a good punter, who could create field position). Risk-taking was not encouraged. Creativity was suppressed.

This was a style of play in which teams did not go for it on fourth down; running the ball was superior to passing the ball; and the better kicking team figured to have an advantage.

Alabama’s placekicker, Cade Foster, missed three field goals. This enabled LSU to win, 9-6 in overtime, in a game which featured zero touchdowns.

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The people who covered Southeastern Conference football called it a defensive classic, a mighty struggle. The game was celebrated for its defense in Southern circles, instead of being buried by outsiders (such as myself) as a display of impotent offense.

When the two teams met in a rematch, just two months later, in the (January) 2012 Bowl Championship Series Championship Game, LSU’s offense was so weak that the Tigers did not cross the 50-yard line until eight minutes were left in the fourth quarter. LSU did not score a point. Alabama won the title with a smashmouth style head coach Nick Saban loved.

One of the defining aspects of SEC football this decade is that anyone who wanted to beat Saban and Alabama had to be different from Saban instead of trying to beat him at his own game.

In 2012, Texas A&M quarterback Johnny Manziel frustrated Alabama’s defense with his speed and creativity.

In 2013, Auburn’s run-pass-option concepts got Alabama’s defense off balance and led to a Tiger upset of the Crimson Tide.

In 2014 and 2015, the University of Mississippi (Ole Miss) used an aggressive and fearless style of offense – which trusted receivers to make plays in the air on jump balls – to beat Alabama in consecutive seasons.

No SEC team which tried to “smashmouth” Alabama – punching the Crimson Tide in the teeth and trying to beat Bama with a punishing, physical style – defeated Nick Saban since that 2011 LSU game, with the possible exception of the 2017 Auburn team which had a rugged defense.

As the decade moved along, some programs (Auburn and Ole Miss) recognized how they had to play Alabama. LSU was slower to realize this under former coach Les Miles, but new coach Ed Orgeron has very quickly understood that the Tigers need to have a dynamic pass-first offense with spread concepts to have a chance to beat Bama.

Last year, Alabama shut out LSU. The Tigers were beginning to understand and recognize the need for a high-tech passing offense, but quarterback Joe Burrow was still learning how to put all the pieces together. After that Alabama game, however, Burrow’s skills as a passer improved markedly. He ended the season by torching opposing defenses from Texas A&M and then Central Florida in the Fiesta Bowl postseason game.

In the 2019 offseason, Orgeron brought aboard Joe Brady – an assistant coach with the New Orleans Saints of the NFL – as a teacher of the LSU passing game. You can see the results this year. Burrow is a leading contender for the 2019 Heisman Trophy. He has thrown for over 2,800 yards this season, with 30 touchdowns and just four interceptions.

LSU has entered the future, just in time to play Alabama in yet another meeting of top-3-ranked teams, in early November.

The 2011 LSU-Alabama game was cut from 1970s cloth. It was your grandfather’s style of Southern college football.

The 2019 LSU-Alabama game is cut from modern cloth. LSU and Alabama both embrace the modern passing game and the need to score as many points as possible.

This isn’t 2011 anymore. This is a reflection of how much college football has changed – in the American South and many other places – over the course of this decade. The LSU-Alabama winner just might determine the decade’s last national champion.

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