If after Week 1, you’d tell a college football fan that the Alabama Crimson Tide are playing like championship contenders 10 weeks into the season, they’d probably think you were crazy.

A lot can happen in 10 weeks.

But a lot can happen in one week as well.

Because a switch flipped after Alabama fell to Florida State 31-17 in Week 1. The loss was like blood to a shark. The second it tasted any sort of adversity, it pounced on the competition.

Last week, Bill Connelly wrote a piece covering the four college teams that are playing like National Champions, and as you can imagine, the fourth-ranked Alabama is right up there.

Apart from the Tide was Indiana, Ohio State and SEC’s Texas A&M.

But what was so intriguing about Connelly’s piece, was that he compared this Crimson Tide’s team to the 2023 Washington team that fell short of the National Championship.

Current coach Kalen DeBoer and offensive coordinator Ryan Grubb just so happened to be spearheading the Huskies first ever College Football Playoff run.

Connelly wrote,”DeBoer's Huskies lost in 2023's title game, but they lost to a Michigan team that ranked 12 spots higher than them on 247 Sports' Talent Composite. The only team that ranks higher than Alabama in this year's Talent Composite is Georgia, a team the Tide have already beaten. This team knows how to see games out and won't face many matchup disadvantages in any hypothetical CFP matchup. That's a pretty scary combination, isn't it?”

He’s not wrong at all here. We saw what adversity has done to this team just recently against South Carolina in Week 9. For three quarters, the Gamecocks completely outclassed the Tide. 

Alabama may have led at the half, but it seemed like South Carolina’s game was frustrating the Tide to no end.

Until the fourth quarter that is.

Fifteen points in the fourth quarter, which also included a savvy defensive play from both Deontae Lawson and Tim Keenan III.

Championship teams make championship plays.

Connelly continued, “Barely beating a two-touchdown underdog is a weird way of getting onto a ‘playing like a national champion’ list, but I'm struggling to avoid feelings of inevitability here, both because of how many times in a row the Crimson Tide have made the exact plays they needed to make in the fourth quarter and because Kalen DeBoer's Washington Huskies basically did the exact same thing two years ago on the way to the national title game.”

Almost feels like a team of destiny right?

After a much needed bye week, Alabama will continue its season of redemption on November 8 against the LSU Tigers.