Knockout punch

ATLANTA – Each week, after their Thursday practice, the Alabama players meet in the locker room, and head coach Nick Saban asks a question. When they open up the newspaper on Sunday, what do they want it to say?

Each week this season, senior tight end Colin Peak has been the first to answer, and his response this week was both simple and prescient: “Tradition restored.”

It had been 10 years since Alabama last won an SEC title and 17 since its last national championship, but the Crimson Tide’s dominant 32-13 win over No. 1 Florida secured that first goal Saturday and put Alabama in position to accomplish the latter on Jan. 7 in Pasadena, Calif., in the BCS National Championship Game.

“You walk down the halls and you see the 12 national championships, the 21 – 22 now – SEC championships, and you’re so thankful to be a part of that that you want to be able to write your own page in the history book,” Peak said. “You want to be able to come back 15 years from now and see your staple that you left on this program.”

The chapter that Peak and his teammates wrote Saturday was well worth the wait for Alabama fans who had suffered as SEC afterthoughts for nearly a decade and played the understudy to Florida for the past year.

Saturday was a rematch of last year’s SEC championship game, but so little of the performance resembled the collapse Alabama endured a year ago. This year was about redemption, but more than that, it was about dominance.

Alabama never trailed in the game, tallied nearly 500 yards of total offense against a Gators team that had allowed more than 300 just once all year, and the Tide’s defense shut down Tim Tebow in his final SEC game en route to one of the most impressive wins any team has enjoyed over Florida in years.

While the credit for the Tide’s dominance was widespread, it was junior quarterback Greg McElroy who earned MVP honors after completing 12 of 18 passes for 239 yards and a touchdown.

From his first pass of the game an 18-yarder down the middle of the field to Julio Jones McElroy was sharp, making plays at crucial moments with both his arm and his feet.

He completed seven different passes for at least 15 yards, including a 69-yarder to Mark Ingram to set up one touchdown and a 17-yarder to Peak in the third quarter that gave the Tide a commanding 26-13 lead.

The Alabama quarterback was hardly the only hero of the ground game for the Tide.

Heisman hopeful Mark Ingram suffered a hip injury last week against Auburn that created concerns about how well he might perform against Florida’s eight-ranked rushing defense. It didn’t take long for Ingram to eliminate the worries.

He ran 28 times in the game for 113 yards and three TDs and caught two passes for another 76 yards.

Backup Trent Richardson got into the action as well, racking up 80 yards on 11 carries, and McElroy wasn’t called on to throw a single pass in the fourth quarter.

For Florida, it was a sour conclusion to one of the most successful runs by any team in the past decade.

The Gators, winners of 22 straight games, were dominated from the start, and while Tebow finished with a solid 247 yards passing and 63 more on the ground, Florida’s offense never got in sync.