A Stat With the Smallest Truth Attached.

It's fun to trash 'Bama anyway, though

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As we warm up to the Super Bowl, which will get played eventually, here’s a fun statistic that lies. Read it carefully, so that you can see exactly how the lie plays out:

"With no Alabama player on the active roster for either the 49ers or Chiefs, a remarkable streak will continue this year: No player who finished college at Alabama has ever scored a point in the Super Bowl. Players from 143 other colleges, from Coast Guard (1 point) to Miami (84 points) have scored in Super Bowl games.”

So — first. Good on the Coast Guard. Kicker Curt Knight, a Coast Guard alum, did indeed boot an extra point for Washington in Super Bowl VII, which was played in 84-degree weather at the Los Angeles Coliseum in 1973 and remains the warmest Super Bowl on record.

That was a dreadful game, by the way. The winning team had 253 total yards. It was a 14-7 final score. But you might remember it for a different reason: The Miami Dolphins’ victory over Curt Knight and the Redskins that day completed the only perfect season in NFL history.

Anyway, I killed a few seconds there. You’ve have time to ponder the stat. Is the deception obvious?

I mention this because it’s making the social media rounds with a fury this week, not to mention the subReddits of a bunch of angry ‘Bama fans. That’s fun in and of itself. But what about Alabama’s weird inability to produce a player who has ever scored in the Super Bowl?

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Sure. Of course you figured it out. The two key phrases at work here are “scored a point” and “finished college at Alabama.”

Bart Starr. Joe Namath. Kenny Stabler. Each of these ‘Bama alums played and even starred in Super Bowl games. But since they only passed for touchdowns (and in Namath’s case, not even that, even though he was MVP of SB III), they technically didn’t score a Super Bowl point. We’re halfway there.

Now: “…finished college at Alabama.” We just wiped out Jalen Hurts, among others. In last year’s Lombardi Trophy loss to Kansas City, Hurts turned in one of the most astounding Super Bowl stat lines in history. He carried 15 times for 70 yards, a SB record for a quarterback. He scored three touchdowns, tying the record for any player, regardless of position. He scored 20 points (three touchdowns and a two-point conversion), also tying a record for any player regardless of position. He completed 27 of 38 passes for 304 yards, with one touchdown and no interceptions.

But…he didn’t finish his college career at Alabama, now did he?

Sooners fans knew this already. Hurts graduated from ‘Bama in 2018 with a B.A. in Communications, but then used his grad-transfer eligibility for one more college run, this time at Oklahoma under Lincoln Riley. (He had another great year and finished second to Joe Burrow in Heisman voting.) Under the limiting terms of our widely-circulated Alabama-hating stat, he’s disqualified.

Crimson Tide fans are defensive about all this, as you might imagine. More than four dozen former ‘Bama players have made Super Bowl appearances, and they’ve got a bunch of rings. (For the record, Oklahoma has the most alumni in this year’s SB with six, the second year in a row that OU has led all colleges in that category.)

Still, I think we can agree that 1.) Selective stats can be used for just about anything in the world, and 2.) Making fun of Alabama never gets old. Carry on.