2018 CFB saved almost all its chaos for the end. WORTH IT.

A season without many surprises ended with Nick Saban’s dynasty getting obliterated.

Since the prior January, we all expected to see Alabama and Clemson playing in 2018’s national title game.

But if there’s one thing we’ve learned from being college football fans, it’s that absolutely nothing is ever etched in stone.

Every year, we see undefeated teams on certain crash courses for each other, with Saturdays falling aside as they power onward, destiny in hand, needing only to clear a significant hurdle in November before th- oh, they just lost in Stillwater in Week 8. On to the next sure thing, which will remain undefeated unti- ah, The Next Sure Thing just lost in Tempe.

Except in 2018, college football kept refusing to stick to its usual CHAOS script.

We had a 2005-style season in which two teams kept towering over everything else, and at almost every point, it felt like we’d end up with Bama-Clemson IV in the title game.

It was a weekly storyline. I’ll never call a college football season boring, but even the sport’s most ardent celebrants granted you had to look a little harder to find the fun, and for all sorts of reasons.

But then! Late October!

Ohio State getting waxed by Purdue in front of Tyler Trent was awesome, and since it happened on the same day as Pullman, Washington State got to start and finish a Saturday with the spotlight, it felt like college football season had finally started.

Blood week had arrived! The chaos gods were finally showing their demented grins! Judgment of the elites! The revolution had begun! Fresno State to the Playoff!

That same day, Bama and Clemson won by a combined 71. The revolution stalled.

The Playoff rankings were virtually unchanged from that point onward.

Almost every team in October’s initial top seven would remain in that group until Selection Sunday, almost entirely only losing to other teams within that club.

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For a month, almost literally nothing changed at the top. In college football! During conference games and everything! Why had the chaos gods turned their backs on us? Had we failed to sacrifice unto them by sufficiently overrating Auburn?

On Halloween, the most obvious Playoff scenario: the three big unbeatens remaining unbeaten as Oklahoma battled the Michigan-Ohio State winner (and maybe a defiant Georgia) for the last Playoff spot. That is what ended up happening.

How could you make the plot so obvious, college football?

We all knew exactly how this was going to end.

The Big Ten, Pac-12, and mid-majordom were probably out. Georgia would probably lose to Alabama in humiliating fashion again. Kyler Murray was awesome, but OU’s defense couldn’t possibly stop Bama. Notre Dame was a non-factor. Clemson was an actual contender, so maybe we’d at least get a good game before one or another preseason top-two team took the throne.

Alabama was going to go wire-to-wire as AP No. 1, just the third team to ever pull that off, and become the first modern FBS 15-0 team. Nick Saban, having finally secured the Great Quarterback stone his Infinity Gauntlet had lacked, was about to add his seventh title and start as the favorite to win in 2019 and onward, with the No. 1 recruiting class soon to board.

Sim to 2021.

We knew Clemson had a chance, but even in the wackiest outcome imaginable, we were still going to be stuck with a team winning two titles in three years by beating the same team as last time. Please be more creative in 2019, college football chaos gods.

Everyone agreed the Tigers were really good almost all season. Your humble author bet on Clemson, in fact. S&P+ and other power rankings had Clemson as only a one-point underdog.

Despite some people professing Bama-Clemson Fatigue, many of us remained confident the game would be interesting, and then we’d all hope for college football to get back to being actually weird in 2019.

So hopes remained high!

The game started hot, but Bama’s yardage margin was nearly tripling Clemson’s, and the writing that’d been on the wall in January just became more and more legible. The chalkiest college football season in recent memory was going to end with the most obvious outcome possible.

And just then — right when we’d finally given up on our last hopes to see something we’d never seen before, right as we were preparing to endure Imagine Dragons, the most Basic College Football Music Possible amid the most Basic College Football Season Possible — the heavens opened.

A missed extra point, a crucial false start, a disastrous fake field goal, one third down bomb after another, and the next thing you knew, Clemson was doing the one thing nobody thought anybody could do: beating the shit out of the Alabama Crimson Tide.

Considering the suffocating context of Alabama’s dynasty, the point spread of more than a couple points in Bama’s favor, the preordained nature of the entire season to that point, the way Bama started out the game, and the result that was like nothing Saban had suffered in well over a decade, it’s fair to say this was the most shocking title game in college football history.

The Tide spent almost literally an entire calendar year as the obvious champion, and then lost to Clemson worse than Notre Dame did.

This post I made about where Clemson now fits into the overlapping, eternal arguments about the greatest college football teams ever? I prepped that before the game as a post about Alabama’s argument, figuring that if Clemson won, I could publish it as “look how great a team Clemson just beat.”

But Clemson destroying a team that was about 44 minutes away from finishing its own Best Team Ever argument made it clear that the Tigers didn’t just prevent history — they created their own.

The preseason No. 2 team winning a title with the same coach who’d won it two years earlier isn’t exactly traditional MAYHEM. But considering how it happened, it absolutely counts.

We will never doubt you again, college football chaos gods.