It was all over in 10 minutes......

Gotta love that Cecil Hurt of the Tuscaloosa News ... he really tells it like it is.

CECIL HURT: It was over in first 10 minutes
Published: Sunday, August 31, 2008 at 3:30 a.m.
ATLANTA The war of nerves started before the game did on Saturday night.
It didn’t last very long.
It started with the coin toss. The University of Alabama won that toss. It elected — maybe “demanded” would be a better word — to receive the football.
When it took the kickoff, Alabama ran the ball straight ahead on three consecutive plays, perhaps as much for the sheer pleasure of smacking Clemson in the mouth as for the yardage that it netted.
That drive ultimately ended with a long field goal, but it also sent a message that was worth a lot more than three points.
Clemson’s first drive sent the opposite message. The first play wasn’t a similar run, a play designed for big back James Davis to answer with some physicality. It was a fade pass that Tiger quarterback Cullen Harper couldn’t complete.
The next play, an overwhelmed freshman back named Jamie Harper fumbled the ball.
Clemson never again called plays as if it thought it could effectively block Alabama. It tried some misdirection, some direct snap trickery, but most of it accomplished little.
The game wasn’t 10 minutes old. But it was over.
Clemson had two highlights after that, one long catch-and-run by speedy Jacoby Ford that resulted in a field goal (Ford didn’t make it through the hard-hitting first half) and a nifty kickoff return by C.J. Spiller, who is so good and fast that he really should get to rush the ball more than two times in a game, blocking or not.
Alabama, as Nick Saban noted, didn’t pressure Clemson much. It played defense aggressively, but with an eye at containing Clemson’s package of bubble screens and other diversions.
Offensively, Alabama just kept pounding. The Tide could throw whenever it wanted. If tight end Nick Walker slept with a blanket upon returning to Tuscaloosa on Saturday night, it was the first time all evening that he was covered.
Mainly, though, the Crimson Tide ran. And ran. And ran some more.
Clemson defensive coordinator Vic Koenning was left to wonder what the number of the Escalade that ran over his front seven might have been, and whether he should have devoted more time to coaching and less to comedy during the week.
“I think the last drive, to take the air out of it for seven minutes, is what you call finishing the game and I was pleased and proud that we were able to do that,” UA coach Nick Saban said.
The closest thing to a scary moment came when Spiller opened the second half with a lightning kickoff return. Last year’s Alabama team didn’t handle such adversity well.
“Those were the things that we would melt down on in the past,” Saban said. “People would flatten out. But we responded and I think when you respond to adversity, that’s the sign of a good competitor.”
The result was Alabama’s first win over a top-10 team since Florida in 2005 and its most notable regular-season non-conference win since a victory over Penn State in 1989. Coming as it does, at the start of the schedule, it will send Alabama fans into an excited frenzy. It should be a cause of celebration, but it should also come with a note of caution. The Atlantic Coast Conference portion of the Crimson Tide schedule is over. Before long, big-boy football – the SEC kind – will begin.
“This is just one game,” Saban said. “We’ve still got to find an identity.
“We’ve just made a ‘B’ on a midterm. Do we slack off and make a ‘D’ on the next one and have a ‘C’ average? Or do we try to make an ‘A’?”
There is no way to downplay the emotions of this win for Alabama fans.
It wasn’t just that the Crimson Tide beat a team that was favored, and had a big reputation, although that must have felt sweet. It was the way Alabama did it – with tough, physical football that has been the Saban trademark elsewhere – that was the most gratifying thing, the first fulfillment of Saban’s prediction upon his hiring. He stated then that Alabama would become a team that other teams hated to play.
Today, Clemson knows just what he was talking about.