There’s not exactly a silver medal ceremony after the College Football Playoff championship game.
The confetti drops and the champion gets their trophy as the losing team trudges to a sad locker room. At some point,
however, a rarely seen piece of hardware arrives for Team B.
It’s so obscure, in fact, that years of this playoff system passed before anyone knew it existed. More on that later.
But the 2022 CFP runner-up trophy is on display in the Alabama football complex, offensive lineman Emil Ekiyor said Friday.
“It’s a participation trophy,” he said bluntly. “You made it but you didn’t do anything. You didn’t win.
I wouldn’t say we fully turned the page but there’s always going to be something that externally motivates us. Yeah, that’s all I’ve got to say.”
It sounds like it looks a lot like the 2017 runner-up trophy. And we only know about that because Scott Cochran broke it a year later.
In a video that quickly went viral, then-strength and conditioning coach Scott Cochran took a sledgehammer to the trophy commemorating the loss to Clemson in Tampa to close the 2016 season.
The clip hit social media before Alabama played Georgia in January 2018 for the national title game that ended with Tua Tagovailoa’s famous pass to DeVonta Smith.
Cochran’s action had the support of the locker room.
“If he wouldn’t have done it, I would have,” Alabama linebacker Mack Wilson said at the time.
“That’s not something we settle for at the University of Alabama. We’re all about winning.”
The 2022 Crimson Tide are taking more of the rub-your-nose-in-it approach to this unwanted piece of history while on display in the team’s dining facility.
“It has a sign under it that says ‘Participation trophy. Are you happy with it?’”
Ekiyor said. “So it’s a little motivation just to see that every day just to remind you this is what we’re really working for,
to change the outcome of the season and focus is the best it can be this year so we ultimately have a different outcome at the end of the year.”