Alabama and Kansas State would much rather be spending Saturday in Atlanta or Glendale, Arizona — the sites of the College Football Playoff semifinals at the Peach and Fiesta bowls, respectively.
Instead, the Crimson Tide and the Wildcats are in New Orleans for the 89th Sugar Bowl, a top-10 matchup of Alabama (10-2) at No. 5 and Kansas State (10-3) at No. 9 in a storied event that has been relegated to a New Year’s Eve morning lead-in for the games that really count in much of the public’s minds.
It must be particularly galling for Alabama. The Tide has been a CFP participant in seven of the previous eight years, winner of three BCS championships in the five years before that, and this year’s preseason No. 1.
“It eats us alive knowing we didn’t make our goal,” Alabama All-America linebacker Will Anderson said.
Many Alabama fans have displayed their disappointment by staying home instead of making their annual postseason trip, leaving the game far short of a sellout and creating the possibility of the smallest Sugar Bowl attendance in the Caesars Superdome era — with the exception of the 2021 game when COVID restrictions limited the crowd to just 3,000.
Kansas State is in a different position. The Wildcats’ only flirtations with the national championship came in 1998 and 2012 when Kansas State lost late-season games to knock it out of the picture.
But after mostly middling success since then (averaging 7.2 victories over the previous nine years), the Wildcats finished second to TCU in the Big 12 regular season, and then upset the undefeated Horned Frogs, 31-28 in overtime, in the conference championship game. That sent them and their fans to their first Sugar Bowl on a high note.
“We knew we were a very good team from the start,” Wildcats junior linebacker Felix Anudike-Uzomah said. “We made a lot of mistakes the first time we played TCU (38-28), then we came back and fixed them.
“That’s why we beat TCU and showed we deserved to be here.”
And the idea of playing a storied program such as Alabama (even though Kansas State faces Oklahoma and Texas every year) has the Wildcats pumped up to the point where it’s being viewed as one of the biggest games in school history.
“This is a gigantic opportunity,” Wildcats junior guard Cooper Beebe said. “Just for our team and our program, facing a team like Alabama is huge. It is a statement game for our program.”
Kansas State has responded by selling its ticket allotment and more. The Wildcats might even be in the majority Saturday.
“Boy, I see purple everywhere I go,” Kansas State coach Chris Klieman said Friday. “I went a little bit away from the hotel last night with family members to a dinner and it was decked in purple.
“So it was a lot of fun to see.”
Under ordinary circumstances, the conventional wisdom is the team that wants to be in the bowl game usually wins. That’s been brought up in particular about Alabama, which lost previous Sugar Bowls against Utah and Oklahoma when it was heavily favored but had no championship at stake.
But that crimson malaise doesn’t appear to be the case this time.
None of the Tide’s top players have opted out — including Anderson and 2021 Heisman-winning quarterback Bryce Young — and the losses to the transfer portal have been minimal.
“The way I looked at it, this was another opportunity to play with my brothers,” Young said. “And I love the guys on my team.
“I love this team and I love this program. It was easy for me to decide to play because I feel grateful to go out with these guys, to compete, to share the field.”
But no Kansas State players have opted out either, and the Wildcats lost no starters to the portal — a fact not lost on Anderson.
“That none of our players opted out and none of their players opted out shows how much football really means to both programs,” he said. “Just how much it means to the players to play one last game and go out and play with your brothers, and give it all you’ve got for one last game.
“I’m super happy to be here, and I know the players at Kansas State are happy to be here as well.”
So maybe there’s a reason this Sugar Bowl does mean something after all.
