Dufresne’s Refrain: Alabama’s Got No Shot

For the last two college football seasons I’ve endured LA Times sportwriter Chris Dufresne’s snide anti-Alabama bias. Throughout the 2008 season, even though the Crimson Tide amassed a 12-0 record, he veritably — and rightly — predicted an SEC Championship mauling at the hands of the Florida Gators. Bama went on to the Sugar Bowl to lose to Utah, a source of pain for me and a source of validation and hilarity for Dufresne.

It was the same again this year. Early on he predicted another perfect regular season — not out of respect for Alabama, but out of disrespect for their schedule. In his weekly rankings, the Tide crept up slowly never rising  higher than 4th, despite always being ranked 1,2, or 3 in various national polls. And in the end, he said,  Alabama would be Sugar Bowl-bound after meeting up with the Gators and going home the SEC Championship losers once again.

Well that vindicating end came yesterday and my Tide proved Dufresne dead wrong by swamping and drowning the Gators, 32-13.

And this morning in his report does Dufresne even come close to saying “Wow!” or admitting he didn’t see that coming?

Nah. He just wonders what all the noise is about.

So I grabbed a cuppa coffee and told him why:

You ask “What’s all the screaming about?”

Well if you heard any noise coming from the Silver Lake area Saturday afternoon it was me as a Bama fan exulting, not to mention turning out the lights on the last two years of your deathlessly dismissive snark.

Sure, you’ve been saying all along that the winner of the SEC was going to play in the national championship, but you were also saying all along that it would never be Alabama. That even if they kept winning, they’d eventually meet Florida and — last verse, same as the first — repeat last year’s defeat.

It would have sincerely surprised me this morning if I’d read any sort of apology — not to Alabama, oh hell no! But to your readers for leaving them so unprepared for what happened in Georgia last night.

But of course you didn’t. Instead, in the wake of such a definitive start-to-finish upset victory the best you could admit — and probably painfully — was that the Tide “soundly defeated” the Gators. Then to make yourself feel better you had to lamely cherrypick from Nick Saban’s post-game comments and giggle about its pro tone. Finally to justify the Longhorns’ tickets to Pasadena you had to go and weakly reference our 12-10 win over Tennessee as some sort of comparison to the victory Texas squeaked by with last night.

Yawn. Of course you did.

And of course you’ll be forced to move Alabama up in your rankings this week, but any higher than one spot to No. 3 (behind TCU and Texas no doubt) and I’ll be shocked!

-Will Campbell

UPDATED (9:45 a.m.): Dufresne digests my email and comes back with — surprise! — a characteristic self-servingly obtuse response:

I should apologize that my No. 4 team, Alabama, beat my No. 2 team?

Ok, then, Im [sic] sorry.

Chris Dufresne
chris.dufresne@latimes.com
@DufresneLATimes

Loser says what?