I think a lot of people (myself included) have had questions about just how good Bama really is leading up to the game. The following article addresses just that.
An honest question: Is Alabama the best team in the country right now?
By Gentry Estes, Mobile Press-Register
September 27, 2009, 1:01PM
A relatively weak slate of national games (aren't those always the weekends that produce the major shifts, by the way?) lured several heavy hitters of the college football journalism world into the press box at Bryant-Denny Stadium yesterday to watch Alabama beat up on a 17-point underdog.
Yet the manner in which the Tide dispatched Arkansas left pretty much all of them reaching the same basic conclusion: Alabama is the playing the best college football in the nation right now.
Take Matt Hayes of The Sporting News, for example ...
One team now clearly stands alone among all the uncertainty. ... It's Alabama. And frankly, it's not that close.
The Tide's latest seal clubbing, a 35-7 victory over Arkansas, underscored all that is right with the most complete team in the nation. And very little of what's wrong.
ESPN.com's Chris Low echoed that in his story from Tuscaloosa ...
(Bobby) Petrino said the Hogs came into the game not really believing they could win.
That says something about where the Hogs are as a football team, but it says a lot more about where the Crimson Tide are.
A month into the season, they’re sitting at the top of the college football world and looking down at everybody else.
Andy Staples of SI.com didn't go so far as to call Alabama the nation's best team, but he did use his typically outstanding prose to explain how the Tide is perceived.
Alabama is the football equivalent of Honda, cranking out a reliable, dependable, un-sexy product that will roll for 300,000 miles as long as Nick Saban keeps changing the oil.
If all this sounds boring, it's not. There's something comforting in a team built to dominate both lines of scrimmage. There's a touch of they-don't-make-em-like-that-anymore nostalgia for team that still uses the run to set up the pass.
My how things have changed around this program. Compare all this love to last year's win at Arkansas, which caused barely a ripple on the national scene, or the Tide's misery that marked the final month of the 2007 regular season.
For what it's worth, this week's top 25 polls still have the Crimson Tide at No. 3, though the gap is starting to slim between UA and No. 2 Texas.
Alabama also picked up a new No. 1 vote in the AP poll ... Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle hopped on the bandwagon with the two original voters and last week's inclusion, John Adams of the Knoxville News-Sentinel.
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