Top-ranked Clemson and No. 2 Alabama have combined to win four of the last five national championships and at least one of the two has competed in each of the last five College Football Playoff National Championship Games.

This season many national pundits have predicted another matchup between the undefeated Tigers and Crimson Tide.

Regardless of what happens this season, ESPN analyst Chris Fowler made it clear that the two programs remain the best and most stable in the nation.

“Those two programs have just been linked in recent years and have wrestled back and forth for supremacy,” Fowler said Wednesday. “I don’t see that changing, LSU had a magical year last year, but the constants are Alabama and Clemson and I don’t see that changing.”

The longtime ESPN host and play-by-play man has been impressed with the program Dabo Swinney has built at Clemson, while turning it into a national power. Fowler, who is also the lead play-by-play tennis announcer for ESPN, compared the battles between Clemson and Alabama to the battles between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal on the tennis court.

Fowler described the teams as robbing one another of titles for the last several years.

“What they have done is amazing and I don’t think anything would diminish it. You could say if the other had not been in the way there would have been an uninterrupted run of trophies,” Fowler said. “They push each other, have made each other better and have been the standard for the rest of the country.”

Fowler and Kirk Herbstreit are set to call Saturday night’s game at Death Valley, which is set for a 7:44 p.m., kick.