Sugar Bowl

84th Annual
Allstate Sugar Bowl
January 1, 2018

---

#4 Alabama 24 (Final: 13-1)
#1 Clemson 6 (Final: 12-2)

---

---

---

Official Game Program
Official Statistics – PDF
Facebook Photo Gallery
Final Game Notes
Alabama Postgame Quotes – PDF
Clemson Postgame Quotes – PDF
Allstate Sugar Bowl Quote Central 2017-18

---

Alabama Wins Playoff Semifinal at the Allstate Sugar Bowl With 24-6 Decision Over Clemson

Never, Nick Saban has been known to say, “waste a failure,” rare as those have been for his teams.

Going up against Clemson in the College Football Playoffs at the 2018 Allstate Sugar Bowl, Saban’s Alabama Crimson Tide had three of those “failures,” to take advantage of:

1. A 26-14 loss to archrival Auburn in the regular season finale.  It was Alabama’s only defeat, but one that cost the Tide the SEC West title and would have kept them out of the playoffs had it not been for three conference championship games breaking right.
2. A last-second 35-31 loss to Clemson in the 2017 National Championship Game, denying Alabama back-to-back titles after they’d beaten the Tigers, 40-35, in the same game the season before. To linebacker Rashaan Evans it, “felt like a death in the family.” Crimson Tide quarterback Jalen Hurts had made a picture of the Tigers celebrating as the screen saver on his phone the next day and kept it there.
3. Finally, a 42-35 loss to Ohio State in the 2015 semifinal, also in the Sugar Bowl, in the College Football Playoffs’ inaugural year, which Saban partially attributed to his treating the game much like any other bowl trip and not enough as one “with consequences.”

“We didn’t sell it to them properly,” Saban said. “We knew if we had an opportunity to do this again, we were going to have a little different mindset.”
 
There were a couple of other incentives for the Tide.
 
Clemson coach Dabo Swinney had voted Ohio State ahead of Alabama on his final coaches’ poll ballot; “momentary insanity,” he called it. Although the CFP selection committee decides the playoff teams, so Swinney’s vote carried no weight, it did not go without notice.
 
More than that, there was the perception that Alabama was slipping, ever so slightly, from its perch of dominance even if the school was the only program to make the playoff in all four years of the CFP. An Alabama columnist even called the Tide and Clemson, “two dynasties passing in the night.”
 
That’s prime bulletin board material. Saban said it wasn’t used, but admitted, “That would have been a good one.”
 
Consider the bear, er, elephant sufficiently poked.

With all off that motivation, should it be any surprise that when the teams met in the playoffs for the third straight year, fourth-seeded Alabama scored a 24-6 victory against the top-ranked Tigers in the Mercedes-Benz Superdome?
 
The Tide, Swinney said, was, “playing with a level of intensity they hadn’t shown before. We competed well, but there’s always another level you’ve got to go, and they did.”
 
Alabama’s intensity level seemingly contradicted the “process” Saban so often talks about, doing what you have to do to obtain your goals supposedly without a high degree of passion.
 
But to Saban, passion is always part of the game, especially when the stakes are high.
 
“The process is accomplishing a definite set of things to accomplish your goal,” he said. “But that has nothing to do with emotion. The importance of the game has a lot to do with how you prepare, especially your attention to detail. You have to play with discipline, but you always have to pay with emotion.”
 
And, as Saban pointed out, while losing in the semifinals has consequences, winning has a reward. Seven days later, Alabama perhaps initially feeling a letdown from the effort against Clemson, rallied from a 13-0 halftime deficit to score a thrilling 26-23 overtime victory against Georgia in the title game, giving the Tide its fifth national championship under Saban.
 
But it wouldn’t have happened without beating Clemson first.
 
“We were extremely pleased with the way we came out and played in the game,” Saban said of the semifinal victory. “The players prepared well, the intensity was really good and the execution was really good.”
 
Saban gave full credit to the benefits of adversity too. “Players don’t always respond when you have a lot of success,” he said. “But they are willing to respond when things don’t go as well.”
 
That included the loss to Auburn. “We thought we deserved to be in the playoffs,” Saban said. “But by not playing well in that game, we’d put our fate in the hands of others.”

Indeed, had Auburn not lost to Georgia in the SEC title game, had previously undefeated Wisconsin not lost to Ohio State in the Big Ten championship game and had Miami beaten Clemson for the ACC title, which still might not have knocked the Tigers out of the playoffs, Alabama would have been watching the playoffs from home.
 
Instead, the Tide came to New Orleans in a very businesslike mode, one that downplayed a team’s attitude about a bowl trip.
 
“You always want to play well and prepare well for a bowl,” Saban said. “But there is also a sense that there’s going to be a certain amount of leisure time so that you can be rewarded for a good season. But when you’re in a playoff game, it’s ‘Let’s pay attention to detail here.’ You have a little different mindset because you understand the consequences.”
 
In contrast, Swinney wanted his team to enjoy its stay in New Orleans.
 
“We always embrace the bowl experience,” he said. “It’s a time we want our guys to remember. I don’t think it had anything to do with the game. Alabama was just better than us that day.”
 
For his part, Saban added that “this was about the smoothest bowl we’ve ever had. The Sugar Bowl does a great job and our guys did a great job of adapting and doing what they needed to do.”
 
For Alabama, just being in the playoffs was similar to 2011 when Alabama lost to LSU, 9-6, in the “Game of the Century,” but got another shot at the Tigers in the BCS championship game thanks to late losses by other contenders, and this time prevailed in dominating fashion, 21-0.
 
While the Clemson score was similar to the LSU one, it was not quite as dominant of a performance.
 
With both teams thwarted by the other’s defenses (the final combined total of 449 combined yards was the fewest in the Sugar Bowl since 1969), Alabama led 10-3 at halftime.
 
Hurts fumbled at his 22 on the first play of the third quarter with Kendall Joseph recovering for the Clemson. But the Tigers missed the opportunity to tie things when three plays resulted in a net loss of five yards and they settled for a 42-yard field goal by Alex Spence.
 
Clemson forced a three-and-out on the next series though. And after the punt the Tigers drove to the Alabama 35 where they faced third-and-2.
 
Then came a huge momentum changer. Tigers quarterback Kelly Bryant looked for a short completion over the middle. Instead he was intercepted by defensive tackle Da’Ron Payne, who took off in the other direction as fast as his 308-pound body could go.
 
Payne made it to the 42 where he was tackled by Tremayne Anchrum in a horse collar stop which drew a flag and moved the ball to the 27.
 
Seven plays later, including a fourth-down conversion run by Damien Harris to the 14, the Tide had second down at the 1. Payne had frequently been in the backfield in such situations. But this time he slipped out in the end zone where Hurts found him uncovered, and he made the grab and managed to balance on tiptoes to stay inbounds.
 
Saban said the call wasn’t one to reward Payne but the play, which he still declines to give the name of, was one the team had worked on all season, just waiting for the right time to use it.
 
For his part, Payne was lobbying for the ball. “Coach had said, ‘Just keep working and you might get it,’” he said. “I think they listened to me.”

Then, on Clemson’s first play following the kickoff, Mack Wilson intercepted Bryant at the 18, returning for a pick-six. In the space of 13 seconds, Alabama’s lead had gone from four to 18 points.
 
More than 20 minutes remained, but those turned out to be the game’s final points.
 
Swinney acknowledged just how big the first interception was. “As poorly as we had played offensively, we were feeling we were in pretty good shape and had a great play called,” he said. “We’ve got our guy open, but Kelly doesn’t see their big guy, the ball pops up, he catches it and takes off and we give them another 15 yards.
 
“Then they get the pick six, and that make us become very predictable on offense. If there’s one thing you don’t want to be against Alabama, it’s predictable.”
 
Despite the disappointment of the loss, Swinney praised what his program has accomplished.
 
“Going to the playoffs three years in a row is something we take a lot of pride in,” he said. “We may be looking back 20 years from now and see that not many teams in history will have done that. We’ve set a goal here to be consistently in the national title conversation, just like Alabama is. We’ll see each other again. Neither team is going away.”
 
That’s obviously true.
 
But to Saban, the expectation level put on his program has become almost impossibly high.
 
“We’re not perfect here,” he said. “It’s unfair to the players to think that when there are so many other good teams and good players out there. But every time we stumble a little bit, it’s like ‘Look how the mighty have fallen.’ But that doesn’t necessarily mean we’re headed in the wrong direction.”
 
Still, there was a level of celebration for the Alabama players seldom seen after their previous victories including those for the national championship.
 
“This game was about our identity as a team,” Saban said.
 
It’s safe to say that if there was any concern about the Tide’s “losing” its identity, it regained it in the Sugar Bowl.

Story by Ted Lewis.

Miller-Digby Award Winners as the Allstate Sugar Bowl's Most Outstanding Players:
Offense: Jalen Hurts, Alabama Quarterback
Defense: Da'Ron Payne, Alabama Noseguard
 

 

Alabama	10	0	14	0	–	24
Clemson	0	3	3	0	–	6

SCORING SUMMARY
UA: Andy Pappanastos 24 yd FG, 5:23 (1st) – 10-47, 5:24
UA: Calvin Ridley 12 yd pass from Jalen Hurts (Pappanastos kick), 0:12 (1st) – 8-46, 3:34
CU: Alex Spence 44 yd FG, 10:00 (2nd) – 13-54, 5:03
CU: Spence 42 yd FG, 12:45 (3rd) – 4-(-5), 2:03
UA: Da’Ron Payne 1 yd pass from Hurts (Pappanastos kick), 5:40 (3rd) – 7:27, 3:38
UA: Mack Wilson 17 yd interception return (Pappanastos kick), 5:27 (3rd)
 

Alabama	Team Stats	Clemson
16	First Downs	14
42-141	Rushing	33-64
16-24-0	Comp-Att-Int	18-37-2
120	Passing Yards	124
66-261	Total Offense	70-188
78	Return Yards	65
6-35.5	Punting	7-39.3
1-1	Fumbles-Lost	0-0
2-10	Penalties-Yds	4-29
32:11	Times of Poss.	27:49

Rushing
Alabama: Damien Harris 19-77; Jalen Hurts 11-40; Bo Scarbrough 12-24.
Clemson: Travis Etienne 4-22; Kelly Bryant 19-19; Adam Choice 5-14; Tavien feaster 4-10.

Passing
Alabama: Jalen Hurts 16-24-0, 120 yards, 2 TDs, 2 sacks.
Clemson: Kelly Bryant 18-36-2, 124 yards, 0 TDs, 5 sacks; Tavien Feaster 0-1-0, 0 yards, 0 TDs, 0 sacks.

Receiving
Alabama: Calvin Ridley 4-39 TD; Henry Ruggs III 2-25; Bo Scarbrough 2-16; Damien Harris 2-4; Josh jacobs 2-3; Najee Harris 1-22; Irv Smith 1-6; DeVonta Smith 1-4; Da’Ron Payne 1-1 TD.
Clemson: Deon Cain 6-76; Hunter Renfrow 5-31; Ray-Ray McCloud 3-1; Tavien Feaster 2-(-3); Amari Rodgers 1-16; Milan Richard 1-4.