I downloaded the ESPN special, Roll Tide/War Eagle on AppleTV and watched it yesterday. While it was visually well done, as you would expect from ESPN, it missed so many key points in the rivalry that I regret actually taking up disk space on my hard drive to store it.
The special should serve as a primer to one of college football’s great rivalries. Instead, it goes horribly astray into paradoxical fans and conspiracy theories. The show begins in the Finebaum show studio and that, unfortunately, sets the tone. I enjoy talk radio in small doses, but let’s be honest. The typical fan of either football team does not call a talk radio program. We listen, absolutely, but the characters who get airtime on talk shows are caricatures of the regular fans. Even though we all chuckle at callers like “Tammy” and like to believe she represents all barners. Sadly, she doesn’t.
The ESPN program glosses over the years when the two teams did not play, but those years are important in understanding the status of college football in Alabama. Both programs started at relatively the same time, the late 1800s, but stopped playing in 1907. Alabama rose out of the obscurity of southern football and elevated itself to the national stage. Auburn did not play a role in the national scene until much later. To Alabama fans, this is the source of the little brother syndrome that many attribute, perhaps unfairly, to the Auburn fan base. It was nice to see one of Alabama’s numerous best-selling authors, Gay Talese, offer commentary during the show. He is from the pre-Bryant years at UA but you can see and feel his love for the Tide in every word. Alabama’s pride began long before the current era. Auburn fans, at times, don’t appear to recognize that college football was played long before Jordan, Bryant, or the AP poll. The SEC is the most powerful conference in college football today, but it plays on a stage built long ago by Alabama.
The program gives publicity – too much of it – to people like Updyke and Jelks. The first one deserves no coverage, the second gets the story wrong. The announcer mentions that Jelks was paid to sign with Alabama, asserting it as fact, and was later paid by Auburn boosters to make allegations against the Tide. No mention is made of the NCAA investigation of the Jelks allegations which found no evidence that Alabama supporters had ever paid Jelks. This key point should not have been ignored, especially since they offered that caveat to Cam Newton later in the program. It was nice to see him get some redemption with his efforts after the tornadoes, but he is not a major player in the story of this rivalry. No mention was made of the pay-for-play scandals that have rocked Auburn through most of modern history – including the one that ended the coaching career of one of the people featured in the show. That era, more than any other, was the beginning of the heightened vitriol between the schools and should have been covered.
The show makes fans of both teams look like goobers. Let’s face it, when the national media comes south they will walk past astronauts, bankers, and business leaders and interview the first goober they can find willing to go on camera and say “I seen it.” Roll Tide / War Eagle has a few good moments showing how fans of both schools came together after the swarm of tornadoes rocked the state in early 2011. The interview with Carson Tinker illustrated how the tragedy affected the real people who suit up for the Crimson Tide each Saturday and the imagery of the aftermath graphically displayed how thousands of lives were forever changed in one afternoon. However, ESPN returned to the sideshow again quickly with more face time for Updyke interspersed with a rather angry-looking unknown piano player.
It’s game day. The rivalry is a part of life in Alabama and fans of both schools will gather over the next few hours ready to watch one of college football’s greatest traditions – the rivalry game. Like so many others in Alabama’s past, this one has national title implications. There is a saying that you throw out the record books with the Iron Bowl. That’s not really true in most years. Sure, there have been some scares and some upsets for both teams in the past, but the history of the rivalry shows that the favorite usually wins. Will it be an upset day or will things go as expected? We’ll know soon enough.
As a final thought, Alabama fans do not say “Roll Damn Tide”, as was oft-repeated in the ESPN broadcast. We just don’t do it. Although Auburn does, often, insert “damn” between their “war” and their “eagle”, most do not say “war f*cking eagle” as Takeo Spikes classlessly repeated several times either. Lou Holtz, not know for his verbal prowess, referred to the Tigers as The University of Auburn. Then again, so did alleged graduate Bo Jackson. So, whether you pull for The University of Alabama or the University of Auburn, here’s to a safe game today – free from injury and incident.
As for me and my family, we will say “Roll Tide.”