LSU and Alabama will collide Saturday afternoon in college football’s first regular-season matchup of the top two teams in the Associated Press poll since 2011.
That’s a lot of hype to navigate between now and when the teams run out of their respective tunnels inside Bryant-Denny Stadium.
“A lot of people will bring it to your attention this week,” Alabama redshirt junior outside linebacker Terrell Lewis said Monday in a news conference. “They’ll say, ‘I hope you have a good game,’ and stuff like that, but at the end of the day, they’re not going to be on the field with us. We just tune that stuff out and go about it casually, but you definitely feel the atmosphere, and it’s different.”
What isn’t different are the teams from the last 1-2 showdown. Top-ranked LSU traveled to Tuscaloosa eight years ago and topped the Crimson Tide 9-6 in overtime, but Alabama won the rematch 21-0 a few weeks later at the BCS championship game in New Orleans.
College football now has a playoff system, and both the No. 1 Tigers (8-0, 4-0 SEC) and the No. 2 Tide (8-0, 5-0) could be among the four teams invited regardless of Saturday’s outcome, but that’s part of the peripheral conversation to this week’s showdown that each coach is hoping to avoid.