News Article: Our State, Our Game: How Alabama Became the Capital of College Football

RTR91

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Nov 23, 2007
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Nick Saban saw it for the first time at 3:45 p.m. on Jan. 3, 2007, the day he was hired. More than 300 Alabama fans stood at the Bama Air Terminal in Tuscaloosa, all of them eagerly scanning the sky, as if looking for God himself to suddenly appear. 

When the private jet carrying Saban and his wife, Terry, landed on the tarmac and the plane door opened, Terry stepped off first, waving to the crimson-colored congregation with a surprised, oh-my look on her face. Then Saban appeared and the fans boiled into a fever, yelling "Roll Tide" like their personal safety depended on it.
When Saban was hired by LSU in 2000, only the team's equipment manager met the Sabans at the airport. But after being in Alabama for mere minutes, as the Sabans sped away from the terminal in an SUV and fans chased after them on foot for several blocks, they understood that the landscape of their lives was now public property.

Gus Malzahn saw it the moment Chris Davis scored in the Iron Bowl last fall on the Kick Six. Tiger fans, in a heightened state of ecstasy, bull-rushed over a fence, pushed past security, trampled over a flowerbed and spilled onto the field. Dozens of students cannonballed into the prickly holly bushes that ring the field. Others locked arms and, three- and four-wide, plowed a path into the heart of the celebration.

One fan tore an ACL. One broke an ankle, and several lost their cellphones. In a matter of minutes, nearly 40,000 were jumping up and down on the grass. One fan, 15-year-old Hayden Hart, was so caught up in the moment that he swiped Malzahn's visor from his head; he would wear it for days, even in bed, believing it would give him magical powers. Charles Barkley, standing in a suite at Jordan-Hare, never had seen such a spontaneous, large-scale explosion of raw emotion in his life, and it gave him a full-body shiver of chills--just as it had done to Malzahn.
 

CrimsonTsunami

Scout Team
Jan 27, 2010
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Here's another article about the importance of football within the state of Alabama and the South as a whole. It contains interesting historical tidbits and talks about the SEC Network and its potential.
 

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