Alabama and Clemson meet Monday night for the third time in the last four Playoff National Championships. Add in their semifinal meeting after 2017, and the two have established a death grip on the sport, stretching across almost the whole Playoff era.
Bama-Clemson and America’s greatest sports duopolies ever
Three title matchups in five years — let alone four — is highly unusual in American sports. In this sport, it’s unprecedented.
Photo by Brian Blanco/Getty Images
Over that span, the Tide and Tigers are 106-4 in games not against each another. They’re college football’s Coke and Pepsi, Boeing and Airbus, or DC and Marvel.
A duopoly like this one has never happened in 150 years of college football, largely thanks to the Playoff itself. The concept of an established championship game remains relatively new, as true 1-versus-2 bowls were rare until the advent of the BCS in 1998. But since then, we hadn’t had a single title-game rematch before Bama Clemson II, let alone three of four with another Playoff meeting mixed in.
A two-team reign like this is rare across all sports, though one American major league’s had way more than the rest.
Even if we loosen the threshold to three championship meetings in five years, it’s not common.
Men’s college basketball has never seen it — there’s only been one next-year rematch, in 1962 between Cincinnati and Ohio State — and women’s college hoops has just once, between UConn and Tennessee from 2000 to 2004.
The NFL has never seen the same teams play in three of five Super Bowls. It’s only once seen two teams play back-to-back years, the Cowboys and Bills in the ‘90s, though there were two duopolies before the Super Bowl era: the Bears and Washington in the late 1930s and early ‘40s and the Browns and Lions in the ‘50s.
Baseball has had a trio of World Series duopolies. Not surprisingly, all featured the team with 40 AL pennants: the Yankees. The Bronx Bombers played the New York Giants from 1921-23, the Brooklyn Dodgers six times between 1947 and 1956, and the Los Angeles Dodgers three times between 1977 and 1981. MLB has not had a duopoly since expanding to eight playoff teams in 1995.
The NHL had a pair in the Original Six era: the Maple Leafs and Red Wings meeting four times, then the Canadiens and Red Wings doing the same. It’s not hard to imagine a pair of teams dominating a six-team league. Since the 1967 expansion, there has been no duopoly.
As one might also expect, the NBA has produced the most duopolies:
- The Celtics and St. Louis Hawks from 1957-61
- The Celtics and Lakers from 1959-69 (overlapping with the previous Celtics duopoly)
- The Knicks and Lakers from 1970-73
- The 76ers and Lakers from 1980-83
- The Celtics and Lakers from 1984-87
- The Cavaliers and Warriors from 2015-18
Statistically, it’s the sport where the best team is most likely to win. Like hockey, its playoffs are seven-game series, which makes upsets harder.
MLS has never had a three-in-five duopoly since starting up in 1996.
The larger the league, the rarer it is to have a duopoly. That arguably makes this Bama-Clemson run even more impressive.
There were six teams in the NHL the last time it had a duopoly. There were 12 in the NFL. Beyond the Dodgers and Yankees’ dominance from 1977 to 1981, MLB had 16 teams the last time it had a World Series duopoly. The NBA is the only major American pro league that’s had one in its current era.
They have also gotten rarer as playoffs have gotten bigger. Yet Bama and Clemson have been the top two seeds in the Playoff in 2015, 2016, and 2018. Even if the BCS were in effect, they’d still be on a similar tear.
Clemson and Alabama are dominant in a sport with five major conferences and around a dozen potential rivals for title-game spots every year.
On the one hand, each year, just 15 or so of the 130 FBS teams have championship-level talent. On the other, no pro league has that many genuine contenders in any given season, and maintaining that talent base is a whole job on its own. It is a major accomplishment for two teams to rule this sport at any time, no matter how many No. 1 classes the Tide sign.
The Tide and Tigers might make this whole era of college football a lot more memorable.
Title-game duopolies make for classic memories. The Yankees and Dodgers gave us Don Larsen’s perfect game and Jackie Robinson stealing home, among other legendary moments. The renewal two decades later, when the Dodgers were in LA, created Mr. October.
The Celtics and Lakers defined two decades in the NBA. The Lakers and Knicks period produced the Willis Reed game. The Lakers-Sixers period produced Magic playing center and Dr. J’s “Rock the Baby” dunk, as well as his famous reverse layup. The Warriors and Cavs produced something about a blown 3-1 lead.
The Red Wings and Canadiens put Gordie Howe against a rising dynasty during a turbulent time.
We tend to remember eras based on the best teams at the time. We tend to remember how seasons end because of recency bias. Put those two factors together, and we are going to remember this period as the Bama-Clemson era.
Nick Saban has seen challengers come and go. Dabo Swinney’s program is Saban’s first persistent rival. The rivalry has already produced two incredible moments: the Bama onside kick and Clemson’s Watson-to-Renfrow buzzer-beater a year later.
Regardless of what happens next, these two teams have carved a special place in American sports history for themselves.
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