TIDE ON TOP
Alabama will start the 2018 college football season in the same spot it concluded the 2017 season: at the top. The Crimson Tide were an overwhelming No. 1 in the Amway Coaches Poll, which was released Thursday. Here is the top 10:1. Alabama2. Clemson3. Ohio State4. Georgia5. Oklahoma6. Washington7. Wisconsin8. Miami9. Penn State10. Auburn
Alabama’s overtime victory over Georgia in Atlanta’s Mercedes-Benz Stadium capped the 2017 college football season in dramatic fashion.
This afternoon, Nick Saban’s Crimson Tide and Kirby Smart’s Bulldogs will begin preseason practices with the shared goal of getting back to the championship game of the four-team playoff. The 2018 season will conclude in Santa Clara, California, though that fact is not expected to come up in the immediate days ahead.
“No team is the same, regardless of whether you’re at the same school,” Georgia senior defensive end Jonathan Ledbetter said during SEC Media Days. “Every year the team rebuilds, and you have to find a way to get that chemistry to where everyone is working as one. Everybody needs to be one machine, and we all need to be sacrificing for the guy next to you.”
Given that Smart worked for nearly a decade as Saban’s defensive coordinator in Tuscaloosa, the Crimson Tide and Bulldogs employ a nearly identical blueprint for getting each season started. The two programs are not only starting today, but each is holding fan day festivities on Saturday. The Saturday practices will be open to the public, and they will be preceded by media sessions in which the offensive coordinator and defensive coordinator for each team will speak for the only time until the postseason.