COLLEGE FOOTBALL / BOWL REPORT : SUGAR : Erickson Expects a Low-Scoring Game

How big is the Sugar Bowl between No. 1-ranked Miami and No. 2 Alabama Friday night? So big that Hurricane Coach Dennis Erickson, who has already won two national championships, calls it perhaps the biggest game of his career.

“It’s probably the most important game I’ve ever been involved in because of what’s at stake,” Erickson said Sunday in New Orleans.

What’s at stake for Miami is a chance to make college football history by winning its second consecutive national title, third in four years and fifth in the last decade. No team has won five titles in 10 years, only one has won three out of four--Notre Dame in the late 1940s--and no team has won two in a row since Alabama in 1978-79.

“We’ve got an opportunity to do something that’s never been done before, and that’s very exciting,” Erickson said.

Despite a 12-0 record and 22-game winning streak, Alabama is the underdog to Miami, which is 11-0 with a 29-game winning streak.

“That doesn’t bother me,” Alabama Coach Gene Stallings said. “When you’re the No. 2 team in the country, somebody is paying a little respect.”

Erickson expects a low-scoring game dominated by two of the nation’s best defenses. Alabama gives up only 9.1 points a game, while Miami yields 11.5.

“I just hope we can score,” Erickson said. “It’s going to be a defensive game, there’s no question about it. Both teams have tremendous talent on defense. I think it will boil down to which offense can move the ball and who doesn’t turn it over.”

Stallings said the latest allegations by former player Gene Jelks are “just another distraction” in a season filled with them.

Receiver David Palmer was arrested twice for drunken driving and sat out the Crimson Tide’s first three games. Several players had close relatives who were killed or died during the season. And last week, linebacker Michael Rogers was seriously injured in a crash and will sit out the Sugar Bowl.

Jelks, a running back and defensive back at Alabama in 1985-89, first claimed last month that he received illegal payoffs to sign with and play for the Tide. Saturday, Jelks made new allegations in interviews with an Atlanta newspaper and CNN.

Jelks told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that a businessman in his hometown of Gadsden co-signed a $13,000 loan during his senior season. He also said the businessman, Harold Simmons, paid two other former Alabama players to appear as grand marshals in a 1991 Christmas parade--the first time Jelks had alleged possible wrongdoing since Stallings was hired in 1990.

“I don’t know anything about it,” Stallings said. “I don’t even know Gene Jelks.”

Simmons, in a telephone interview Sunday, denied any wrongdoing.

“It just didn’t happen,” he said. “Gene worked for me in the summer of 1989 and I wrote him checks for that.

“As far as the bank note he says I signed, that’s totally untrue. I wish he would produce that note, because I’d like to see it myself.”

Simmons said he lined up former players Clyde Goode and Stacy Harrison to appear in a Christmas parade in Attalla last year, but denied that any money changed hands.

“I called the university and got two players for the parade,” Simmons said. “I don’t think you’d have to pay any of them to do it because that’s the kind of people they are. No players were paid to do anything.”