Alabama made it a perfect 4-for-4 Sunday afternoon when it comes to qualifying for the College Football Playoff.
The Crimson Tide, however, entered this year's four-team field through the back door.
After losing its regular-season finale 26-14 at Auburn on Nov. 25, Alabama sat out Saturday's Southeastern Conference championship game, which Georgia won 28-7 over the West champion Tigers. The Tide were at the mercy of the selection committee, which tabbed them as the No. 4 seed for a Jan. 1 date against No. 1 Clemson in the Sugar Bowl.
Alabama (11-1) got the fourth and final spot over Ohio State (11-2), which won the Big Ten title Saturday night with a 27-21 topping of Wisconsin, the last undefeated team from a Power Five conference.
"There is a lesson to be learned here, and I shared this with the team today," Nick Saban said on a teleconference. "Because we didn't finish the season the way we wanted to finish and didn't play the way we like to play or to the standard that we like to play to, we put our fate in someone else's hands. You like to control the things that you can control. You can always control your behavior and your performance, and we didn't do that.
"There were a lot of people who I tried to influence as far as looking at the whole body of work for the whole season and getting the best four teams in the playoff. I felt like we were one of those best four teams. We were certainly pleased and happy that things worked out the way they did, but there was a little white-knuckle time for all of us in terms of being judged by somebody else."
Alabama played in the first three playoffs as the SEC champion and as either the No. 1 or No. 2 seed.
The SEC produced half of this season's four-team field, which is a first in the event's short history, with Georgia earning the No. 3 seed and a Rose Bowl date with No. 2 Oklahoma. The Tide are just the second of the 16 teams in the first four years of the playoff to receive a bid despite failing to win their league, with Ohio State last year being the first.
Committee chair Kirby Hocutt told ESPN on Sunday that Alabama was "clearly the No. 4 team," even without a conference crown.
"When you look at Alabama's one loss, it was against the No. 7 team in the final rankings, Auburn, in a very competitive game," Hocutt said. "You compare that to a two-loss Ohio State team, with obviously one loss at home to No. 2 Oklahoma, but more damaging was the 31-point loss to an unranked Iowa. We spent a great amount of time last night and into the morning talking about the full body of work now that the complete season is in front of us, and the selection committee just favored Alabama's full body of work over Ohio State.
"It was consistent over the course of the year. As we saw Alabama play week in and week out, our rankings showed that as we started with a clean sheet of paper each and every week that the selection committee believed that Alabama was the better football team."
Urban Meyer's Buckeyes upset Alabama in a Sugar Bowl semifinal during the inaugural playoff in 2014 and then topped Oregon to win the national championship, but the Big Ten representative has been outscored 69-0 in the two playoffs since. Ohio State lost 31-0 to Clemson in the Fiesta Bowl after last season, and Michigan State lost 38-0 to Saban's Tide in the Cotton Bowl after the 2015 season.
Hocutt said the past two playoffs did not factor into Sunday's final rankings.
"We have the flexibility and the discretion to put in nonchampions in the top four if they are one of the four very best, and that's what took place," Hocutt said.
Wisconsin finished No. 6 in the final rankings, with Auburn, Southern California, Penn State and Miami rounding out the top 10. Auburn finished 2-2 against the teams in this year's playoff field but had to settle on a Peach Bowl date against undefeated Central Florida.
Alabama's opponent in New Orleans will be no stranger, with the Tide and Dabo Swinney's Tigers having met in the past two national championship games. Alabama topped Clemson 45-40 to win the 2015 national championship, its fourth under Saban, while Clemson prevailed 35-31 in January for its first national title since 1981.
Deshaun Watson quarterbacked the Tigers the past two seasons before being selected 12th overall in the 2017 NFL draft, but Saban and his staff will study their two recent encounters.
"I think you can always take things from someone that you've played in previous seasons to try and develop a history of things that they do," Saban said. "Even though they have some different players, systematically they have the same coaches, so I think you can take some things technically from those games."
Clemson began this season ranked No. 5 in The Associated Press poll and suffered a midseason stumble against Syracuse, which wound up 4-8. The Tigers have been stout down the stretch, routing Miami 38-3 Saturday night in the Atlantic Coast Conference title game.
"I'm really proud of this team," Swinney told ESPN. "This team wasn't picked to win our division, much less be in the playoff, so I think that speaks to the mindset that we have have rooted in our culture here."
Injury updates
Saban told ESPN that senior safety Hootie Jones suffered a knee injury at Auburn that will cause him to miss the Sugar Bowl but that outside linebackers Christian Miller and Terrell Lewis and inside linebacker Mack Wilson should be healthy.
"Getting those players back is going to be huge for us, because we just had that one position get hammered," Saban said.
Senior inside linebacker Shaun Dion Hamilton is out because of a broken kneecap incurred against LSU.
Contact David Paschall at dpaschall@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6524.