Alabama SI Cover Tournament: Fresh Heir (Tua Tagovailoa) vs. Eddie Lacy Fantasy Issue

Help BamaCentral determine which Alabama Sports Illustrated cover is the best, and a Top 25 list

You have to admit, they're both impressive-looking covers. 

One celebrates a national championship, Alabama's dramatic overtime win over Georgia to win the 2017 title, the other celebrates both a running back and the growing world of fantasy football. 

Tua Tagovailoa and Eddie Lacy clash in a first-round matchup of the Alabama SI Cover Tournament, a 48-field single-elimination bracket to determine the best Crimson Tide Sports Illustrated cover.

Vote on Twitter (@BamaCentral) or Facebook (@AlabamaonSI). The voting goes 24 hours for each matchup and the result added to the original post on BamaCentral.

A quick note, a first-round matchup from the final regional will be posted over the weekend, with voting lasting through Memorial Day on Monday. 

First round

Bear Bryant Regional

Game 11: Fresh Heir (Tua Tagovailoa) vs. Fantasy Defies Reality (Eddie Lacy)

Fresh Heir 

Sports Illustrated

Story headline: It Takes Tua

Subhead: A bold coaching decision. A furious second-half comeback led by a true freshman. A stunning missed field goal. A miracle overtime TD pass. The Crimson Tide had to dig deeper than usual to beat Georgia and win Nick Saban's record-tying sixth national title.

Excerpt (by Andy Staples): He held his headset in his hands, and if he hadn't needed it, he might have thrown it all the way from Atlanta to Tuscaloosa. Alabama coach Nick Saban had put the ball in the hands of a backup true freshman quarterback (by choice). That quarterback was protected by a true freshman left tackle (by necessity). Now, down three in overtime of the national title game, those two had produced a disaster.

Tackle Alex Leatherwood had replaced injured starter Jonah Williams in the third quarter. Leatherwood had played well until Alabama's first offensive snap of overtime, when he let Georgia linebacker Davin Bellamy slip past. Bellamy chased Crimson Tide quarterback Tua Tagovailoa, who had replaced starter Jalen Hurts to start the second half, backward. Bellamy dived and missed, but teammate Jonathan Ledbetter joined the pursuit. Tagovailoa kept backpedaling. Tagovailoa scrambled the wrong way so long that Bellamy had time to get up, chase again and sack him for a 16-yard loss.

But the great thing about freshmen is, they don't know what they don't know, and Tagovailoa didn't seem to grasp that the sack was supposed to doom his team.

Fantasy Defies Reality

Sports Illustrated

Story headline: Living in Dread

Subhead: Fantasy owners beware. The harsh realities of being a modern-day NFL ballcarrier: Never knowing which back could supplant you or when your career might end. All you can do, like the Packers' second-year man Eddie Lacy, is take the opportunity and run with it

Excerpt (by Ben Reiter): In the past 20 months Eddie Lacy has been named the MVP of the SEC, the offensive MVP of the BCS championship game and the NFL's Offensive Rookie of the Year. Lacy, who turned 24 in June and stands 5' 11", 230 pounds—mostly muscle, some dreadlocks—is almost certainly one of the 10 best running backs in the world. Fantasywise, he's top five. And yet he spent this off-season in Geismar, La., living in a trailer that his family rents for $800 a month.

That meager three-bedroom living space is the same one to which the Lacys—including father Eddie Sr., mother Wanda and younger sister Brittany—decamped eight years ago. That was after Hurricane Katrina had rousted them from their home in Gretna, just across the Mississippi River from New Orleans, and sent them on an itinerant, savings-depleting journey to Texas and then back to their home state. When the Lacys left Gretna in August 2005, believing they would return in three days or so, a 15-year-old Eddie chose to take with him his Nintendo 64 and not his brand-new pair of Carmelo Anthony Nikes, which he still mourns. "Prettiest pair of blue shoes I ever had," he says.

Results

Fresh Heir (Tua Tagovailoa) d. Eddie Lacy Fantasy Preview 84.8-15.2 percent