This is an opinion column.

Blame Robert Neyland. The Tennessee football coaching legend set the standard for setting Alabama football as the standard against which all others should be measured. Back in 1934, the General got poetic about it and put it like this: “You never know what a football player is made of until he plays Alabama.”

Vince Lombardi played a role, too, in the legacy of Roll Tide. The Green Bay Packers coaching legend added another block of granite filled with gravitas to the crimson tradition’s foundation. After Lombardi’s Packers won the first Super Bowl in January of 1967, he was asked what it was like to be the greatest football team in the world.

“I don’t know,” Lombardi said. “We haven’t played Alabama yet.”

Fast forward to the 2023 College Football National Championship Game. Not long after Georgia established its dominance over TCU, not long after kickoff, well before the final score settled at a cartoonish 65-7, I took to Twitter and tossed this raw meat into the maw.

“Is it really a national championship if you don’t have to beat Alabama along the way?”