My freshman year of college, I was not spiritually connected and did not make much of an effort to go to church on Sundays.
Saturdays, however, were a different story.
You see, I was not attending The University of Alabama my freshman year. I was considered an outsider, an “unofficial official” fan. Many of my friends went here and could root for their school. But, being a student at Wallace State Community College in Hanceville, I had no football team, and so I became an adopted student, if you will.
Every single Saturday of the 2008-09 football season, I would make it a ritual to drive an hour and a half blasting the latest hip-hop hit, pumped for a weekend chock full of Crimson Tide sports.
“You don’t even go here,” I would constantly be reminded.
But it didn’t matter what people would tell me – the ambiance of football season in Tuscaloosa engulfed my senses every single weekend, whether it was the smell of Dreamland BBQ on the Quad or hearing “Rammer Jammer” from outside Bryant-Denny Stadium. Heck, I even enjoyed the RV traffic spanning from Interstate 20/59 to University Blvd. just because it meant I was that much closer to the Saturday spectacle.
If for only one weekend, it felt like I had a college team to root for, and whenever I would return to Wallace State, I would tell tales of how I spotted whichever player had been featured on ESPN that weekend on campus.
However, when I finally became enrolled at the University in January 2010, those feelings of fandom and obsession quickly began to diminish, even though we had just come off a BCS National Championship.
No longer did I view Mark Ingram or Julio Jones as superstars and the “Gods of Saturday.” They quickly just became part of the normal student body population. I remember my first encounter with football players at Lakeside Dining Hall – the feelings of obsession started to overtake me. I desperately wanted to ask for their autographs, but I had to take a step back and remind myself of one important thing: they are students, just like me.
Where once stood a man who viewed collegiate athletes as gods and heroes, now stood a coherent and rational student.
With the recent success of our football program and many of the other sports in the Crimson Tide athletics family, fandom has turned into obsession. It reached a point where a man not even associated with The University of Alabama poisoned something an entire university community cherished as a landmark.
The obsessiveness and irrationality of fandom has even brought on the stereotypes pertaining to young women and their connections with athletes on campus. It seems as if women on campus can no longer be friends with or talk to a football player or any other athlete without being considered a groupie, or “bops,” as the new generation labels them.
Every Crimson Tide fan should take a step back and realize that these young men and women are human beings just like us. They go to school, go to work and, in some cases, support their children just like us.
It is not a crime to be a devoted and avid fan of a team. In fact, that is what separates our great University from most. We have the best fan base in the entire country and should be proud of it because that is what drives our football and all other athletic programs.
But what if we were put in a similar situation like the wonderful fans of Penn State are in? Would we substitute our love and devotion for our football program for justice?
So, as the student, alumni and non-student population prepare watch our team take the field at Cowboy Stadium on Saturday, remember one thing: win or lose, these men are still human beings, just like you and me.
