How Bama-Clemson IV can be like USC-Texas 2005, explained with help from Vince Young

What comes to your head when you’re asked to recall anything about the 2005 college football season? The answer is probably this play:

The entire season built to it with an incredible amount of hype. Texas and USC were clearly the best two teams in the country, and they met for all the marbles in the end. They gave us a game for the ages.

Guess who has a chance to do something similar this year?

“Yeah. That’s history, man,” Vince Young said. “History always repeats itself.”

Young was talking with SB Nation on Sunday, a day before Bama-Clemson Round IV. He was made available through a press tour with Panini America, the collectibles and trading-card company he’s long partnered with.

“So it was a bunch of games like that happened before mine — ours,” young said. “History does repeat itself, and I’m pretty sure USC guys, as well as my teammates, didn’t think that we would be playing one of the biggest college games ever.”

They were, and it’s how a whole season got remembered.

USC and Texas were literally wire-to-wire 1 and 2 in the human polls and the BCS standings. Clemson spent some time a bit further down in the polls this year. In the one that matters, though, the Playoff selection committee rankings, Bama and Clemson sat firmly in the top two spots in every announcement.

They’re also the clear top two programs of the Playoff era, now playing for a fourth time. Maybe the simplest testament to their dominance, as Bill Connelly puts it:

Not including games against each other, Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide and Dabo Swinney’s Tigers have played 110 games of college football, a game defined by a pointy ball and the flakiest members of the population (18- to 22-year-old males), since the start of the 2015 season. They have lost four of them. FOUR.

Bama and Clemson are farther above the rest of the top 25 than USC and Texas were from a pure win/loss perspective. This season, there were only seven teams behind them with fewer than three losses in the final regular-season poll. In 2005, there were 15 behind the top two. For comparison, in the 2017 season, there were 10.

Advanced metrics tell a similar tale about overall team quality. There’s always a middle class in college football. But 2005 and 2018 were notable in the fact that college football’s upper class was pretty much just two teams without anyone else, and it has always been that way from training camp through the bowl games.

Bama and Clemson are both in the 99th percentile in S&P+ ratings. Getting one team above that threshold doesn’t happen every year, much less two of them. 2008 did have four, but that makes for a group at the top. This is about a clear-cut top two. They’ve been both farther ahead of the pack and closer to each other than usual:

Like 2005, this season has two teams — and only two — head and shoulders above everyone else. In 2005, the next best team was Ohio State, 4 points behind No. 2, and the No. 4 team was Oklahoma, 9 points behind. This season, pre-Championship, S&P+ No. 3 Georgia is 3 points back (with three losses), and Oklahoma is next at 7 points back.

We’re playing in the margins here, but where ratings are concerned, the Tide and the Tigers are better than the rest of college football in a way similar to how USC and Texas were.

The teams involved know how good they are. There’s a healthy respect that builds up when you spend a whole season at 1 and 2 (or four years in those spots, give or take).

“We had the utmost respect for USC, period, because of what they did the previous year,” Young said. “As a player and as a team, you always wanna play the best, and they was the best at the time. So we wanted to play those guys.”

Meanwhile, Dabo Swinney described facing Nick Saban’s Bama like this:

“It’s literally like competing against John Wooden. The guy is unbelievable.”

And here’s where Clemson and Bama have a standard to meet that almost seems unattainable. You’re never gonna get the same combination of venue (Rose Bowl), player star power (Matt Leinart, Reggie Bush, Vince Young), the voice of God on the call (the late Keith Jackson), and all the other things that combined to make January 4, 2006 so epic.

But you can get a great game played by two great teams that comes down to the wire. We’ve already seen these two deliver one photo finish:

Texas was 23-1 heading into the 2006 Rose Bowl. USC was 24-0 in its last two years and defending national champs. Clemson’s now 27-2 in the last two seasons after winning the 2016 crown. Bama’s 28-1 in the last two, and defending national champs.

While Clemson-Bama fatigue is very real for some, there is something so special about these two teams again meeting for the fourth time that we shouldn’t discount. We get to see defining squads duke it out in a title rubber match.

A Bama win gives Nick Saban more AP titles than Bear Bryant won and further entrenches the Tide as this era’s best. A Clemson win gives the Tigers “team of the era” status right along with Bama, with two Playoff titles just like the Tide (and two head-to-head wins in championship games).

They’ve already given us one classic. If they can give us another, none of this comparatively boring season matters in the long run. We’ll remember that we slogged through the drudgery for an incredible cherry on top. And that’ll hopefully make it all worth it.