Championship rings are the ultimate flex. Take all the hopes and dreams of your opponents, all the early mornings they climbed out of bed in order to get the best of you, all the nights they spent lying awake fretting over you, distill them into a piece of jewelry that you can fit in your pocket and show off at parties. That's what a championship ring represents.
And it's hard to imagine a flex-ier flex than Alabama's latest championship ring, the 18th of the vintage and sixth of the Nick Saban era. Every detail is a flex:
-- 135 stones on the face of the ring, representing each point the Crimson Tide scored in their defeats of Florida, Notre Dame and Ohio State.
-- Two secondary stones representing the two national titles won by the senior class.
-- Fifty-two stones around the border, one for every point scored in the SEC and CFP title games.
-- Eighteen crimson stones, one for every claimed national title.
-- On the inside, the Rose Bowl logo over the state of Texas with the score of the once-in-a-lifetime semifinal win over Notre Dame.
Although truthfully, somebody's mind had to start drifting into ring design mode right around the 1:48 mark of the second quarter of the national championship game, when DeVonta Smith glided to his third touchdown of the quarter to give the Tide a 35-17 lead in an eventual 28-point win.
These rings mean a job well done. They signify a mission accomplished. They're continuation of the proof that playing for Saban pays off, that 14 seasons in, every player who lasted three seasons has at least one national title ring.
But only the 2020 team has rings like these.