A few hours before kickoff, my wife and daughter and I went to Gladys Knight’s place in Atlanta for the chicken and waffles (can’t recommend the “Midnight Special” enough) and the room was full. It seemed like every third table was occupied by people wearing crimson or orange. When they caught the attention of someone in similar colors they would utter their war cry. “Roll Tide,” of course, or “War Eagle.”
This was just a very small sample of the prelude to the game. If you were to say, “Which game?” to any of the people wearing those colors and speaking those strange incantations, then the answer might have been, “You know … the game.” As in, the only one that really counts. The one they had been anticipating all year long.
It is also known as the “Iron Bowl,” or just Alabama/Auburn.
As rivalries go, it is college football’s best and fiercest (if that is not redundant) and has been written about exhaustively. (I wrote my own book on the subject, several years ago.) For many, many fans the old joke applies. It isn’t life or death … it’s a little more important than that. I keep expecting to be driving around the state of Alabama some day and catch sight of a bumper sticker that reads Center censer Auburn essen delendam.
The game, which was finally played at 7:45 p.m. (before television, college football games were played in the afternoon as the gods, and Cato, intended) and it was a thriller, though purists were doubtless appalled by the profligate scoring. According to legend, the game is supposed to be hard nosed, hard-hitting, and won or lost on defense. This one had more offense and scoring than any in history. Final score, 55-44, with Alabama winning.
For the Tide, could the season end any better than that?
Probably not. But the question is moot. The season has not ended. For either team.
Alabama will travel to Atlanta this weekend to play for the championship of the Southeastern Conference. Their opponent will be Missouri. Should they win, they will then await eagerly the Tuesday announcement from the temple where the high priests of college football gather to name the top four teams in the nation. These will then enter a playoff to determine which is number one.
It is a new system, devised to replace one that was determined to be insufficiently objective. That system led to arguments (heaven forfend) and complaints from schools that felt they had been unfairly denied the opportunity to settle things on the field rather than in the media and through the application of computer algorithms as had been the practice. This had led to injustices such as the one where Alabama and Louisiana State played one January to determine who would be number one when the two teams had played just a few weeks earlier. The rematch, it was said, denied worthier teams and cemented an unfair reputation for southern football superiority.
The wonder is that the Supreme Court wasn’t called in to settle the dispute. But, then, some of its decisions still get blood boiling years after.
Modern college football aficionados have craved, for years, a system equivalent to the one in college basketball that produces a national champion through head-to-head competition in a seeded tournament. A diminishing number of football traditionalists were okay with the old “system” and argued that the obsession over who is “number one” was diluting the character of the game which had once been less about rankings than rivalries. Army/Navy being the sine qua non of these. General MacArthur once quipped (hard to imagine him quipping, but still …) that he had stopped the war to celebrate the success of West Point over Annapolis in the 1944 game. And it has always been acknowledged that it didn’t make any difference what your record was, it was not a successful season unless you beat that other service academy.
But the modern football sensibility cries for a number one team and not one that has been named according the subjective criteria of sports writers, or digitally by computers. But on the field.
So we have this year a new system and it could have been devised in Washington depending, as it does, on a committee of “experts” following a bunch of “metrics.” We are becoming, it sometimes seems, a culture ruled by commissions, in thrall to metrics.
In this case we have the College Football Playoff selection committee which, beginning in the middle the season somewhere, met weekly and issued its findings. In this case, these were rankings of the major college football programs, one through twenty-five. How this differs, exactly, from the rankings of sports writers has never been made clear. Maybe it is the quality of the experts. Among them are many former big time athletic directors and coaches. They are to football what former U.S. Senators and state governors are to federal commissions on … whatever.
Included among the former administrators of bloated athletic departments and coaches of failed football programs is the commission’s most conspicuous and only female member, Condoleezza Rice. She is famously a football fan but her appointment to the commission was still controversial. She, in fact, says that she had never been involved in anything quite so disputatious. The objection to her appointment came down, essentially, to “What does she know?”
Fair question. And universal, it should be said. There are millions of college football fans who consider themselves qualified for the job. Better qualified than someone who has squandered countless hours working as Secretary of State and Provost of Stanford when she could have been studying on spread offenses and the relative strengths of the SEC and the Pac Ten.
Still, Ms. Rice and fellow commissioners will rule on Tuesday, December 9. They will announce which teams enter the four-team fight to the death to determine who will be crowned national champs and validate the “We’re number one” brag for its fans.
But this is, in the end, an abstraction. Cerebrally satisfying, perhaps. But you have to think that there is something a bit cold and bureaucratic about it. Would Cato have been content merely to outrank Carthage? No way, one thinks. The thing needed to be settled head to head – with a lot more body parts thrown in. Being ranked higher than your blood rival can’t possibly match the satisfaction that comes with victory on field. Nothing can equal the psychic satisfaction of whipping up on that team, the one whose fans were recently sitting across the room from you in their colors, eating chicken and waffles.
Last year, Auburn beat Alabama in one of the most memorable games of the series, running back a missed, last-second Alabama field goal attempt for a touchdown. Auburn then fell just short of being ranked number one when it lost a close one to Florida State in some post-season bowl game sponsored by one corporation or another. But that loss was as nothing, and quickly forgotten, against the “pick six” win over Alabama.
Getting ranked number one at the end of the season is business. Lots of television revenues and a big edge in recruiting.
Beating your rival?
That’s personal.
