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Though only a few weeks have come and gone, it's safe to say that the biggest game of the young 2024 college football season will be played this Saturday night when the No. 2-ranked Georgia Bulldogs make the 273-mile trip from Athens to Tuscaloosa to take on the No. 4-ranked Alabama Crimson Tide.
Georgia vs. Alabama has come to define the SEC over the last decade with the two teams meeting multiple times in both SEC and National Championship Games.
In that time, Alabama has gotten the better of their SEC counterpart more often than not, but this Saturday, despite their recent run of success in the rivalry, the Tide enter their matchup with Georgia as the underdog.
“No. 4 Alabama begins the week as a rare home underdog to No. 2 Georgia in Saturday's SEC showdown in Tuscaloosa,” writes ESPN's David Purdum. “The Crimson Tide on Monday were consensus 2-point underdogs to the Bulldogs at sportsbooks.”
Purdum notes that to this point, the Tide had been favored in 90-straight home games. The last time Alabama was a home dog was in 2007 when LSU came to Tuscaloosa and beat Alabama by the final score of 41-34. This was Nick Saban's first season as the head coach at Alabama. Bama finished that season 7-6 but wouldn't win fewer than 10 games in any of the next 16 years.
To further highlight Nick Saban's dominance, Alabama hasn't been an underdog in any regular-season game since 2015. Coincidentally, that game was against Georgia.
Alabama went to Athens and put a 38-10 beatdown on the Bulldogs. Georgia would eventually go on to hire Alabama assistant Kirby Smart away from the Tide after Alabama won the National Championship — the fourth of six Saban would win in Tuscaloosa.
With Kalen DeBoer in the midst of his first season as the head coach of the Crimson Tide, the respect that sportsbooks once had for Alabama may be diminishing slightly. But even though the characters may have changed, the story thus far remains the same. Through three games, Alabama has outscored their opponents by an average score of 49-8.
That's some Nick Saban-era dominance right there, but this weekend will be the test to see if Kalen DeBoer can keep this program where they've been for the last 16 years… atop the college football world.
