Win or lose, it’s a safe bet that Nick Saban’s expression as he skulks the sidelines tonight will betray little more than his standard glare, the trademark countenance of man who’d rather be recruiting. Make no mistake, though: Whether it elicits any discernible reaction from Saban himself, a second consecutive championship victory over Clemson would represent an historic moment for Alabama and its venerable coach, even by the standards of a program that often feels like it takes winning on the biggest stage for granted. The Crimson Tide are playing specifically for the 2016 title; with it comes a readymade place in college football history.

PREVIEW: Definitive breakdown of how they match up

Among the milestones within reach tonight, if the Tide finish their season-long mission march toward two in a row:

1. One For the (Other) Thumb. The number of the night is six: With a win, Saban will join Bear Bryant as the only coaches at any major program, at any point, under any system or methodology, to claim six national championships over the course of their careers. The 2016 crown would mark Saban’s fifth in Tuscaloosa during this decade of dominance, in addition to his 2003 triumph at LSU, moving him to 6-0 in BCS/Playoff title games overall. (Bob Stoops’ four appearances and Urban Meyer’s three victories are a distant second in the current era.) If you’re following along at home tonight on ESPN, expect to hear the number six early and often.

In fact, if you really want to get technical about it there’s a decent case to be made that a sixth championship would put Saban in a class by himself. One, his teams are competing on a far more level playing field than Bryant’s in terms of scholarship numbers, strength and conditioning, resource allocation, and NCAA enforcement. And two, all of Saban’s titles are effectively undisputed*, earned as part of a system designed specifically to crown a national champion.

In Bryant’s era, the distinction was about as disputed as it could be — see the 1973 season, for example, when Bryant claimed championship No. 4 despite a Sugar Bowl loss to undefeated Notre Dame. At the time, the coaches’ poll held its final vote at the end of the regular season, at which point it crowned then-unbeaten Bama No. 1 regardless of what happened in the bowl game. The Fighting Irish took the Associated Press crown after the bowls, and the ’73 title officially went into the books as a split decision.

The absurdity of pretending bowl results didn’t matter forced the coaches’ poll to add a final, definitive vote after the 1974 bowl season, a move the AP had made a decade before after watching undefeated, top-ranked Alabama lose to Texas in the 1965 Orange Bowl. Bama still claims both prematurely awarded titles for Bryant, neither of which holds up to scrutiny in hindsight. But there are no asterisks in this story: Decades-old controversies notwithstanding, Saban is only playing on Monday for the tie.

[*True, USC has a legitimate claim to a share of the ’03 title, but not to the whole hog. Saban’s best LSU team won its half fair and square.]

2. Eight to Five. Where Saban has truly separated himself from Bryant, hardware-wise, is his efficiency: He’s on the verge of matching the Bear’s presence in the trophy case in less than half the time. After his first championship, in 1961, it took Bryant 18 seasons to win his fifth, in 1978. (No. 6 followed in 1979.) From his first title at Alabama, in 2009, Saban needed just seven years to win his fourth, and No. 5 could come tonight in year eight. Where Bryant’s record briefly ebbed in the late sixties, about a decade into his tenure, all available evidence suggests the Saban Death Star will remain fully operational for the foreseeable future.

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To put that run in perspective, only one other coach in the poll era (from 1936 on) has won four national championships in the span of a single decade: Frank Leahy, winner of the 1943, ’46, ’47, and ’49 titles at Notre Dame. Leahy earns additional degree-of-difficulty points for taking off two years in that span to enter the Navy at the height of World War II, a fact that lends an entirely different kind of perspective. Presumably Saban is an unlikely candidate for the SEALs, but a fifth national title in just eight seasons would be an unprecedented feat.

3. Nine-Year Itch. Another way to put Alabama’s decade of dominance under Saban into context is to compare similar runs historically, which are few and far between. This seasons is Saban’s 10th in Tuscaloosa, and his ninth since the 2008 team emerged more or less fully formed as the burgeoning juggernaut we’ve come to recognize. Already, the Tide have more wins in that span (112) than any other school in any nine-year period in the poll era, in part to the expanded opportunities offered by a 12th regular-season game, conference title game, and the plus-one championship game — Saban’s teams have averaged 12 wins since ’08, more than many teams have historically played in an entire season.

Look past the quantity, though, and the quality is arguably even more impressive:

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Pound for pound, no modern team will ever surpass the Dust Bowl outfits under Bud Wilkinson, which were essentially unbeatable for a full decade. Aside from a pair of Oklahoma juggernauts a generation apart, though, Alabama’s 90-percent success rate from 2008 on is the best sustained, nine-year record in living memory. It’s also the only entry from a major conference in the 21st Century, another sign of just how difficult it is to deliver that level of year-to-year consistency that makes multiple championships possible without at least a temporary step back in rebuilding mode.

In this category right now, it’s Saban, Meyer at Ohio State, and no one else, pending Dabo Swinney finding an instant replacement for Deshaun Watson at Clemson or Jim Harbaugh continuing to do Harbaugh things at Michigan.

4. Best. Defense. Ever. You don’t need to be reminded that Alabama plays killer defense. If you’re a football novice who just stumbled across this post in a kind of last-minute cram session for tonight’s big game, the one thing you already know is that Alabama plays killer defense. (Also: Welcome!) The Crimson Tide enter tonight’s game ranked No. 1 nationally (again) in total defense, scoring defense, rushing defense, yards per play, yards per carry, first downs allowed and future first-rounders. They scored 11 defensive touchdowns and went the entire month of November without allowing a touchdown; if they’re not at the top of a given category, they’re close.

Given Bama’s track record of first-rate defenses on Saban’s watch, it’s worth pointing out just how well the current unit stacks up historically, relative to the others. Like, all of the others: A few weeks back, I compared Alabama’s 2016 D to the best defenses of the poll era using Sports Reference’s Simple Rating System, a tool that allows for comparison across eras while accounting for the long-term inflation in conventional stats like yards and points per game, and found they held up just fine; at that point, the Tide boasted the highest rated college defense according to SRS in the past 80 years. Two postseason games later, they’re still holding strong.

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For posterity’s sake, of course, the defense’s historical rep will have a lot more to do with how it fares against Deshaun Watson and Clemson’s blue-chip receivers than a relatively obscure algorithm on the Internet. Watson torched the Crimson Tide in last year’s title game as badly as any opposing quarterback in the Saban era, making it hard to envision this group going out on the same kind of domineering note against the Tigers as the 2011 and 2012 units against much more pedestrian attacks from LSU and Notre Dame. If it even comes close, the ’16 D can cement its place as Saban’s best, which puts it squarely in the running to go down as one of the best, period.

5. Wire to Wire, Coast to Coast. Since the introduction of the preseason AP poll, in 1950, exactly two teams have managed to run the table from preseason favorites to postseason champs without forfeiting the top spot at any point during the season: Florida State in 1999 and USC in 2004. That’s it.

A handful of others have come excruciatingly close, including (most recently) the massively hyped USC team in 2005, whose encore appearance in the championship game was infamously upstaged by Texas, and Ohio State in 2006, when the Buckeyes’ coronation was thoroughly trashed by Florida. Proof that, at this stage, being unbeaten and especially “unbeatable” can be as much a curse as a destiny.

Alabama doesn’t arrive with quite the same aura of inevitability tonight, if only because of a) Last year’s down-to-the-wire finish against Clemson, and b) Media types (yours truly included) who seem a little skittish about the last-minute coordinator purge on offense with a true freshman quarterback.

The 6.5-point spread, though, sells the Tide for exactly what they are: A solid preseason frontrunner that has only distanced itself from the pack as the year has worn on. Bama has earned at least 50 of the AP’s 61 first-place votes in every poll since its opening-night evisceration of USC, after which no other contender even entered the discussion; by November it was earning all 61 on a weekly basis.

That level of unanimity is rare, and Alabama has yet to do anything on the field to suggest it isn’t fully warranted. If that’s still the case on Tuesday morning, it will seem absurd that anyone ever could have thought otherwise.