Alabama SI Cover Tournament: SEC Beware (Glen Coffee) vs. Sweet Alabama Basketball

We close out the first full week of the Alabama SI Cover Tournament with two of the biggest wins in recent memory, the football team's dominating performance over Clemson in the 2008 season opener, and basketball's upset of top-seeded Stanford in the 2004 NCAA Tournament.

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First round

Joe Namath Regional

Game 7: SEC Beware (Glen Coffee) vs. Sweet Alabama (Chuck Davis)

SEC Beware:

Alabama Sends an Early Warning

Story headline: The Tide is Turning

Subhead: On an opening weekend that produced a handful of surprises, none was bigger than Alabama's dominance of Clemson

Excerpt (by Austin Murphy): He is this intriguing blend of New Age and Old School. But with kickoff against ninth-ranked Clemson looming last Saturday night in the Georgia Dome, Nick Saban dispensed with the psychobabble and channeled the Bear. "If we're going to win this game," Alabama's glowering second-year coach told his charges, "our defensive line is going to have to whip their offensive line."

Having issued that challenge, the man with the perma-tan watched his D-line, anchored by SUV-sized nose guard Terrence Cody, rise to it. While it was the Tigers who came into this Chick-fil-A College Kickoff with arguably the nation's top tailback tandem in James Davis and C.J. Spiller, 'Bama outrushed Clemson, 239 yards to ... zero.

"Doesn'tmatter how good they are," noted Crimson Tide linebacker Brandon (Knock You on Yo') Fanney, "if they got no hole to go through."

The 34-10 score barely hints at Alabama's soup-to-nuts domination of a squad thought to be the class of the ACC. It is also an indication that Saban has this storied program on track to return to the grandeur that many of its fans still consider their birthright.

Sweet Alabama (Chuck Davis)

Story headline: No. 1 ... and done. Big Upsets by Alabama, Nevada and UAB blew up the NCAA chalk

Subhead: The Tide washes Stanford out

Excerpt (by Grant Wahl): Only once since the brackets were expanded to 64 teams in 1985 had two No. 1s failed to survive the opening weekend (in 2000). These upsets were a reminder that the tournament can still be a
capricious beast, or as 'Bama coach Mark Gottfried likes to call
it, "the greatest show on earth. Everybody's got a chance." ...

Indeed, Alabama's game-breaking second-half run on Saturday,
which turned a 53-40 Stanford lead into a three-point deficit,
didn't come out of nowhere. In its 72-68 overtime win at Arkansas
on March 3, the Tide climbed out of a 22-point hole. "We just
keep fighting," says 'Bama's senior point guard, Antoine Pettway.
"Seeds and rankings don't mean anything in March."

No Tide player had a bigger influence last week than Pettway, the
fast-talking former walk-on from Alberta, Ala. After last
season's starting point guard, Mo Williams, left early for the
NBA, skeptics in Tuscaloosa wondered if Pettway--who'd started
only 10 games in three years--could handle the position. "I was
hearing things in the paper: He can't run the point," the 6-foot
Pettway recalls. "But I just took it as fuel." On Saturday,
Pettway started his 31st straight game, and his three-pointer
gave Alabama the lead for good at 55-53. "Pett has a big heart,"
says Tide guard Earnest Shelton.

Results

SEC Beware (Glen Coffee) def. Sweet Alabama (Chuck Davis), totals to be added