Alabama Football: Fans of other schools don’t get ‘Rammer Jammer’
By Ronald Evans
Fans of other schools don’t understand the Alabama football chant ‘Rammer Jammer’ and think Alabama fans are arrogant.
This time of year Alabama football fans must slog through a summer wasteland devoid of football.
The offseason is akin to an extended Summer Solstice combined with the movie Groundhog Day. The 100-plus days that begin the day after the A-Day game and continue until the first day of fall camp in August drag by slowly.
It feels as though the no-football void will never end. Though a different season, the feeling is well articulated by Bill Murray’s weather prediction in Groundhog Day.
What is an Alabama football fan to do, to survive until Fall? There are many options, drill down on recruiting, scour all the preseason prognostications, and google anything and everything applying to Alabama football.
We do all three but our favorite is the Google approach. Doing that this week, we uncovered a Gridiron Now piece from January 2016.
Let’s be clear, we have no distaste for Gridiron Now, just the opposite, we follow it regularly. We do not know the author, John Cubelic and thus have no reason to believe he is not a fine, bright journalist.
Our concern is that in 2016 John was compelled to lecture Alabama football fans about our Rammer Jammer cheer. We fully support freedom of speech. John is entitled to hate the Crimson Nation’s favorite cheer. He is entitled to write about that hatred as well.
However, when he chooses to lecture Alabama football fans about behavior, we are entitled to exercise our freedom of speech, and state that on this subject, John could not be more wrong.
John’s complaint can be read in its entirety in Rammer Jammer is foul tradition. We will include snippets of John’s argument below, but first, a brief story that very much applies.
My younger son came to me several years ago and recounted a humorous exchange with a high school classmate. She was an Auburn fan, and she asked my son and Alabama fan, why Alabama fans were so arrogant. My son did not know how to explain to an outsider, that we are arrogant because we are Alabama fans. Arrogance is the byproduct of being a fan of college football’s greatest program EVER.
Most hatred by fans of all the lesser schools is driven by jealousy. Alabama fans know defeat but we always know we will rise to dominance again. It is easy to be humble when your program’s record pales when compared to Alabama football.
Apparently, Mr. Cubelic attended Auburn. He has our sincere condolences. Due to that misfortune he believes throwing toilet paper into trees (or is it steel cables again this year) is superior to chanting Rammer Jammer.
He described our Rammer Jammer chant as:
"“distasteful, classless, unsportsmanlike conduct constantly committed by ‘fans’ of the Crimson Tide … such disrespectful actions (by) people who so clearly miss the meaning of sports … such humiliating and degrading rhetoric cheapens … (and until UA bans) this dereliction of sportsmanship, Alabama will remain the capstone of distaste.”"
Like my son’s friend, John might have asked, “Why are Alabama fans so arrogant”? The problem is when anyone asks that question, the answer is beyond their comprehension.
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The Alabama men’s golf team is playing in the NCAA Finals. On Saturday Alabama softball can advance to the WCWS by beating the Gators. RTR Forever!