ESPN - Connelly: The incredible numbers behind Alabama's historic greatness

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The 2020 college football season was ... a lot.

It frustrated, divided and exhausted us. It turned coaches into amateur epidemiologists. It asked players to take on extra risk to make money for others, as collective feet continue to drag on getting them the added economic rights they have been owed for decades.

It also, however, gave us perfection.

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SP+ grades 2020 Alabama as the greatest team ever

I'm not here to tell you which stats or algorithms to believe. There are plenty of good systems out there, and they all tell interesting stories. I like my SP+ ratings, because of the depth of the stories I can tell with them. I've run them with complete play-by-play data going back to 2005, and I've created estimated versions of them from 1883 to 2004 based on game results and scores. It provides solid predictive accuracy in the present and contributes wonderful historical context for a lot of the writing I do.

I say all of this for one specific reason: SP+ thinks more highly of Alabama's 2020 team -- which just wrapped up a perfect 13-0 campaign with a 28-point thumping of Ohio State in the College Football Playoff National Championship -- than any other team in the history of the sport.

Best teams since 1883, according to SP+ percentile ratings:

2020 Alabama (99.718)

1959 Syracuse (99.692)

1956 Oklahoma (99.691)

1959 Ole Miss (99.651)

1974 Oklahoma (99.612)

Slap whatever disclaimer you want on this: This was a pandemic season; everyone played a different number of games; depth charts were randomly wiped out by COVID-19 issues (in addition to all the normal football issues a team has to deal with -- injuries and whatnot). Feel free to apply an asterisk to everything we saw this season; I can't stop you. But Alabama dealt with all of those issues, right down to losing two key offensive stars to injury (wide receiver Jaylen Waddle and center Landon Dickerson) and, for a spell, losing their head coach to a positive coronavirus test. The Crimson Tide played more games than any team this season and more SEC games than any team has ever played in a season, and they not only went unbeaten, they won all but one game by more than 14 points.

Having monitored these ratings all season, I figured the Tide would end up pretty high on this list. I also expected Ohio State to give them a pretty tight battle. Instead, the Buckeyes were underwater by halftime of the title game. Yes, injuries and COVID-19 protocols had a role to play in that -- Ohio State was missing two key defensive linemen, then lost star running back Trey Sermon to injury on his first carry -- but again, Bama was missing stars, too. And the Tide dominated the Buckeyes so thoroughly that they rose past every other truly dominant team college football has produced.

That's stunning in and of itself. And it's more stunning to think of how Alabama reached this point: with offense.

In response to the proliferation of the spread offense, burgeoning run-pass option concepts and the no-huddle, Nick Saban famously asked back in 2012, "Is this what we want football to be?" Some friends of mine in the college football community and I have long joked that, while it seemed at the time that he was complaining, he wasn't; he was simply asking for confirmation. Once it turned out that the answer was yes, he slowly set about building one of the most furiously effective spread offense and RPO games the world has ever seen (albeit without a lot of the hurry-up aspects).

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In October, Saban gave another increasingly famous quote, this time to ESPN's Chris Low: "It used to be that good defense beats good offense. Good defense doesn't beat good offense anymore. ... It used to be if you had a good defense, other people weren't going to score. You were always going to be in the game. I'm telling you. It ain't that way anymore."

It's one thing to say this. It's another to properly respond to it. Saban, a lifelong defense-first adherent, asked Lane Kiffin, then Brian Daboll, then Mike Locksley, then Steve Sarkisian to modernize the Alabama attack. The "new" Bama offense started out at 23rd in offensive SP+ in 2015, then rose to 14th and 11th in 2016 and 2017. The Tide ranked first in defensive SP+ each year, but the trade-off began to take shape in 2018. Alabama rose to second in offensive SP+ (behind only Oklahoma), but ranked seventh on defense. In 2019, the Tide were second and third, respectively.

This fall, with Sarkisian calling the plays and adding an extra layer of tweaks, fakes and eye candy to the proceedings, Alabama's offense was just about perfect. Even more so than the last perfect offense we saw: 2019 LSU.

Despite playing two more games against SEC foes and avoiding any nonconference cupcakes, Alabama posted numbers that either matched or topped those of the magnificent 2019 Tigers attack.

Points per game: 2020 Alabama 48.5, 2019 LSU 48.4

Yards per game: LSU 568, Alabama 542

Yards per play: LSU 7.9, Alabama 7.8

Success rate (no garbage time): Alabama 59.3%, LSU 57.4%

First downs per game: Alabama 28.1, LSU 27.9

Third-down percentage: Alabama 58.9%, LSU 49.7%

Total QBR: Alabama 95.9, LSU 94.7

When Saban won his first national title at Alabama in 2009, his Tide scored 32.1 points per game (21st in FBS) and allowed 11.7 (second). Eleven years later, they averaged 48.5 (first among teams that played more than four games) and allowed 19.4 (13th). This was a full-scale evolution. Saban rebuilt his incredible program around offense, and it produced maybe the best full-season performance of all time.

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Hyperbole is a great, provocative weapon for a writer. Nothing is genuinely provable, and any claims of all-time greatness are forever debatable. (That's what makes it such great debate fodder.)

But I'll say this: If you want to claim that the greatest coach in the history of college football just produced the greatest team in the history of college football to further the greatest dynasty in the history of college football (and with the greatest receiver, to boot), I have the stats to back you up.

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