Put yourself in Nick McCloud’s shoes.

You’re an All-ACC cornerback with 5 years of Power 5 experience. You spent the entire year as one of the key cogs for one of the best defenses in college football. You’ve got an opportunity to get Notre Dame a national championship berth.

In order to do that, though, you’ve got to contain one of the most prolific offenses we’ve ever seen at the Power 5 level. That means preventing the Alabama offense with 3 Heisman Trophy candidates from making home-run plays. That’s to be expected, though. This is what you signed up for when you left NC State to go to Notre Dame as a grad transfer.

And then you meet Najee Harris.

Go high on the 230-pound Harris and you risk getting trucked in front of millions of people. But no sweat. You’ve got the sideline working as an extra defender. You should at least be able to break down and make a play.

Or so you think. That is, until you look up and see that Harris soared over you without even slowing down. You fall down and watch Harris sprint down the sideline for 53 yards.

By the time you collect your footing and watch Harris dart off, maybe you’ve realized that you’re about to be on a poster forever. You’re the Patrick Ewing to Scottie Pippen. You’re the Brian Bosworth to Bo Jackson.

I mean, this picture was probably up in Alabama’s facility before halftime:

Now step out of McCloud’s shoes and back into your own. You probably didn’t need to watch all 60 minutes of Friday night’s Rose Bowl, but even if you did just see Harris’ superhuman hurdle, you should’ve gotten the message.

Slowing 2020 Alabama down, no matter what you do, might just be impossible.

You can have experience. You can have talent. But if you don’t have dudes like that, well, you’ve got no shot.

That’s not strictly a reference to Harris’ status as a former 5-star recruit, though it is worth noting that Notre Dame signed 2 such recruits from 2016-20 while Alabama signed 18. One could point to the 24 rushing touchdowns he had in 11 games — an even better pace than Derrick Henry during his Heisman season of 2015 — and realize that having to contain Harris for 60 minutes is next to impossible. At least this version of Harris. Like, the dude who had 5 touchdowns and 245 scrimmage yards in an SEC Championship shootout.

It didn’t matter that the Irish had a top-15 run defense and it actually did a halfway decent job on Harris outside of that run (he still had 155 scrimmage yards).

Alabama has human beings who can do supernatural things, and Notre Dame doesn’t.

That’s not a slight at the Irish, who became the first defense to hold Alabama to less than 35 points since Steve Sarkisian became the Crimson Tide’s offensive coordinator in 2019 (that was an FBS record 24 consecutive games). If Clark Lea was still applying for jobs and not already the new Vanderbilt coach, that would be at the top of the résumé.

But still, the Irish spent the entire day playing on its heels against Alabama, who ended up with 31 points in a 3-score win. Welcome to the club, Notre Dame. That was the 10th time that Alabama won by at least 3 scores in 2020. Notre Dame saw first-hand that much like trying to tackle Harris in the open field, there still isn’t a blueprint to defend this Alabama offense.

There was another (not-as-viral) sequence that showed just how brutal it is to attack the Crimson Tide for 60 minutes.

Trailing 21-7 in the middle of the third quarter, Notre Dame had actually settled in a bit after Harris and Co. came out swinging. Then Ian Book forced a throw that Christian Harris intercepted. On the very next play, Mac Jones hit John Metchie on a crossing route that picked up 40 yards thanks to DeVonta Smith blocking 30 yards downfield. Four plays later, Alabama didn’t feed Harris. Instead, Jones found his Heisman finalist wideout on the front of the end zone to make it 28-7.

It happens that quick. One second, you’re breaking down to make a tackle on the sideline for a short gain. The next, you’re looking up and wondering how you just got punched in the jaw before you could even get your gloves up.

That’s the 2020 Alabama experience. Facing Smith and Harris seems unfair because it is. Usually seniors with supernatural abilities are using those supernatural abilities in the NFL, not against college mortals like McCloud and the Irish.

It doesn’t mean that Notre Dame was vastly overrated or that Brian Kelly isn’t good enough at his job. Shoot, his team actually covered a 19.5-point spread, which didn’t really look promising when Alabama sprinted/hurdled out to a 14-0 lead. Kelly encouraged his team before the semifinal showdown to show that they belonged on that field with mighty Alabama, which it didn’t do 8 years ago in the lopsided BCS National Championship. You could make the case his team did a much better job of that this time around.

What was inevitable was that we’d get those reminders that the 2020 version of Alabama was on a different level. Whether that was Harris’ hurdle that broke the internet or Smith’s soaring grab in which he was suspended in time, Nick Saban’s team has a different gear. Harris showed us what it looks like when it’s in overdrive, and as he often does, he did so in epic fashion.

One last hurdle remains in Miami. Nothing suggests Alabama will have any issues clearing it.