TAMPA, Fla. — Alabama’s locker room was cloaked in silence, a scenario impossible for the team to imagine minutes earlier. Every so often, a scream would emerge from the room, of anguish instead of the expected exhilaration.
The Crimson Tide hadn’t felt the agony of a loss in nearly 16 months and were left to endure one of the most painful endings college football had ever produced.
The second straight national championship win over Clemson looked certain with a 10-point lead in the fourth quarter Monday night, but by early Tuesday morning, Alabama’s 26-game winning streak was snapped.
The Crimson Tide’s title had been taken.
It was too soon for the 35-31 upset loss to the Tigers to sink in. And in the locker room where players could do little but pat the shoulders of the friends with their heads in their hands, it seemed like it would never make sense.
“It definitely sucks,” said Alabama’s Marlon Humphrey, one of the few losing players willing to talk after the game.
Alabama was looking for an unprecedented fifth national championship in eight years. Nick Saban was trying to tie Alabama icon Paul “Bear” Bryant with a sixth national title. Under Saban, the Crimson Tide had been 97-0 with a double-digit lead in the fourth quarter. Under Saban, Alabama had never lost a national championship game.
Even after blowing a double-digit lead late in the fourth quarter, the team’s second set of back-to-back titles was just 2 minutes and 7 seconds away after Jalen Hurts scrambled for a 30-yard touchdown to go up 31-28. To finish their second undefeated season under Saban, they just needed the best defense in the country to make a stop.
Saban couldn’t have asked for anything more. He wouldn’t have wanted to win another ring another way.
Instead, Clemson scored 21 fourth-quarter points, clinching the championship with Deshaun Watson’s 2-yard touchdown pass to a wide-open Hunter Renfrow.
“We just didn’t make a play when we needed to. We needed to get a sack. We needed to get a takeaway. We needed to get a stop in the red zone, and they made the plays and we didn’t,” Saban said. “Look, there’s not one play in the game that makes a difference in a game. We could have done a lot of things a lot better.
“I think every loss is very painful, and my loss is really for the bad feeling that I have for the players who have worked so hard to create this opportunity for themselves and not to be able to finish this is very disappointing for me. That’s the part that makes it difficult. But every loss, if you’re a competitor, is never good. But these kind, when you had a great season and the players had done so much to create an opportunity, it’s tough to lose this way.”