Alabama’s suffocating defense bottled up LSU running back Leonard Fournette and provided Crimson Tide quarterback Jalen Hurts the luxury of a few scoreless quarters to get accustomed to deafening Death Valley.
Hurts finally escaped the grasps of LSU’s stingy defense on a 21-yard touchdown run that broke a scoreless tie early in the fourth quarter, and No. 1 Alabama remained unbeaten with a 10-0 shutout of the 15th-ranked Tigers on Saturday night.
“You can talk about winning ugly and maybe it wasn’t always pretty, because we certainly didn’t execute and do things the way we’d like, but you’ve got to give LSU a lot of credit,” Alabama coach Nick Saban said. “It was a tough atmosphere for us out there. But our defense was outstanding.”
Saban could have used any number of superlatives to describe his defense, which didn’t let LSU run a play from inside the Crimson Tide 30.
“We’ve got some pretty hateful guys that play defense around here that are pretty good competitors,” Saban said. “When they get challenged a little bit, they usually respond and I think they responded really well tonight.”
The Crimson Tide (9-0, 6-0 Southeastern Conference, No. 1 CFP) won for the sixth straight time against LSU (5-3, 3-2, No. 13 CFP), and remained alone in first place in the SEC West – a game ahead of Auburn.
BATON ROUGE, La. — Already it has congealed into a two-part national ritual. First comes the unveiling of the mid-season rankings from the College Football Playoff Selection Committee, from its command-central boardroom at a surreal hotel with a gaudy atrium near the Dallas-Fort Worth airport. Just after that, there comes, each autumn, like pumpkins on the porch, the hasty reminder that these mid-season rankings have no relevance to anything except the glories of idle chatter because only the final rankings really matter.
The Cleveland Cavaliers were pushed to the limit by the Philadelphia 76ers, and LeBron James doesn’t think that’s such a bad thing.
James scored 25 points, moving into 10th place on the NBA’s career list, and added 14 assists and eight rebounds as the unbeaten Cavaliers held off the winless 76ers 102-101 on Saturday night.
“It’s always great to have these kinds of games,” James said. “We will clean it up. It’s a great learning experience for us. I know we have room for improvement.”
Kevin Love added 20 points and 11 rebounds for the reigning champion Cavaliers, who improved to 6-0.
Coach Tyronn Lue wasn’t disappointed, either, that the result was so surprisingly close.
“We stayed poised,” Lue said. “We were tested tonight. Overall, I’m pleased to come out with a win when we had some adversity.”
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