This game was, for most, a known snoozer: a ~55-point spread favoring a #2 team that probably didn’t need much rest after an easy effort against Duke the weekend before. The Tide passed, the Tide ran, the Tide tackled. The other team did some (but not as much) of these activities too. Boring.
But when we run the graphs (see the companion article with all the graphs), some weird tidbits emerge. The storylines and fan-talk coming out of this game focus on the Tide’s dominance overall, and especially their dominance in the air: but both of those points contain more nuance than you’d expect.