There can be no hyperbole around Alabama’s historic greatness

Bill Connelly is a staff writer for ESPN.com.

The 2020 college football season was … a lot.

It frustrated, divided and exhausted us. It turned coaches into amateur epidemiologists. It asked players to take on extra risk to make money for athletic departments while we continued to drag our collective feet on getting them the added economic rights they have been owed for decades.

It also, however, gave us perfection.

SP+ grades 2020 Alabama as the greatest team ever

I’m not here to tell you which stats or algorithms to believe. There are plenty of good systems out there, and they all tell interesting stories. I like my SP+ ratings, because of the depth of the stories I can tell with them. I’ve run them with complete play-by-play data going back to 2005, and I’ve created estimated versions of them from 1883 to 2004 based on game results and scores. It provides solid predictive accuracy in the present and contributes wonderful historical context for a lot of the writing I do.

I say all of this for one specific reason: SP+ thinks more highly of Alabama’s 2020 team — which just wrapped up a perfect 13-0 campaign with a 28-point thumping of Ohio State in the College Football Playoff National Championship — than any other team in the history of the sport.

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