Clemson back for another shot at Alabama in monster title rematch

TAMPA — Deshaun Watson wasn’t afraid to say it. Wasn’t afraid to believe it deep in his gut. Darn sure wasn’t afraid to put in the work to make it a reality.

The pain was palpable after Watson and his Clemson team fell just short of 15-0 glory last season, losing 45-40 to Alabama in the national championship game. Yet so was the star quarterback’s determination as he shared a simple message with the college football world:

We’ll be back.

And here they are, indeed. The No. 2 Tigers touched down Friday more than 2,000 miles from the site of last year’s title game in Glendale, Ariz., yet with precisely the same goal: beating the Crimson Tide.

Yes, No. 1 Alabama is back, too.

“We weren’t going to sit there and say we’re not going to be in Tampa or in the national championship,” Watson recalled this week. “We wanted to be in the front again and be one of the best teams.”

In getting back to this point, Clemson has made clear that it — not Ohio State, not Oklahoma, not Florida State, not anyone else — is the leading program in all of college football.

Outside of Alabama, that is.

The 14-0 Tide will go for their fifth championship in Nick Saban’s 10 seasons as coach. They lost their starting quarterback and their Heisman Trophy-winning running back from last year’s title team, but no big deal. They lose a host of defensive stars to the NFL, but no problem at all — this year’s defense is easily the best in the country.

Others rebuild. Alabama reloads.

But everyone and his sister knew that already.

“They ain’t missed a beat,” Clemson coach Dabo Swinney said.

Yet the same can be said about Swinney’s 13-1 team, which moved on without seven defensive players drafted from the school after last season. Anyone who watched its 31-0 evisceration of Ohio State on New Year’s Eve understands full well that the Clemson program has ascended to a new level.

“They know they belong,” Swinney said. “They know they’re good enough.”

The standard of excellence Alabama has set under Saban is alternately awe-inspiring and numbing. Starting with the championship campaign of 2009, Saban’s first in Tuscaloosa, the program has won 100 games — 12½ per season — and lost a mere 10. There’s no such thing as surprise when the Tide play for all the marbles. It’s a surprise only when they don’t.

Only at a school where the standard is this high — and only with a coach as demanding and controlling as Saban — would an offensive coordinator be shown the door days before a national title game. The banishment of Lane Kiffin will be an ongoing story throughout the weekend and, likely, a major theme during Monday night’s game telecast.

“There’s no why, there’s no if, there’s no but. It just is what it is,” Saban said this week.

Meanwhile, Clemson is a team that seems to be in perfect harmony. And the standard of excellence within Swinney’s program is no joke, either.

A good way to look at it is through the lens of Watson’s brilliant career. The junior is 31-3 as a starter. One of the defeats came in 2014, when Watson was knocked out of the Georgia Tech game in the first quarter. The next one didn’t come until last January in Arizona. The only other loss came on a last-second field goal by Pittsburgh in November — a wild game in which Watson threw for 580 yards but was intercepted three times.

Outside of that, Clemson has been a monster. Alabama long has been just that itself. There’s nothing boring about this championship rematch — the first since college football instituted an official title game in 1998.

And who knows? They might just make it three in a row next year.

Follow me on Twitter @slgreenberg.

Email: sgreenberg@suntimes.com