Thursday, November 20, 2008

Tide fans that send things to media mailbag columnists are a good omen for the future

You've seen it before and a more accurate visual metaphor would be the cat only lifting one paw to try and swat away a small bird that's about to peck it to death, or something, but Auburn Blog requires eagle, no?

I find myself linking to Stewart Mandel way too often these days, but I'm afraid I must do so again to point out the following gem of a question submitted to Fat Jared's mailbag column this week:

Let's go ahead and acknowledge that Florida is a great team. That being said, does it surprise you that so many people are chalking up a "W" for the Gators before they even play Alabama? When else have these two met in the SEC title game? Let's see ... there's 1992 (Alabama 28-21)) and 1999 (Alabama 34-7). Methinks the pundits should reserve judgment until AFTER the game.
-- Curtis, Leeds, Ala.

Picking on the logic employed by random e-mail writin' fans is unbecoming--fish, barrel, etc.--but the holy hell, dude, it takes some serious powers of selective memory to forget that Florida owns a 3-2 record against the Tide in the SEC title bout (a retort so obvious even Mandel was savvy enough to employ it). Quite honestly, if you want to draw an analogy between this year's impending meeting in Atlanta and games from the Tide's past (as both Curtis and follow-up Tide fan George are happy to do), clearly the closest and best analogy is the '94 championship game, which matched up 1. a Tide team that rode fundamentally sound quarterbacking, a punishing ground game, and a stout defense to a series of closely-contested wins and a perfect regular season record 2. a Florida team that had overcome an early-season upset to ring up a whole string of gaudy scores behind the Gators' Heisman candidate quarterback and the fresh-faced coach's explosive offensive scheming. (That result was 24-23 Florida, for what it's worth.)

But I'm not writing this post or offering you Curtis's complaint as a means of discussing the Tide's match-up with the Gators. I'm discussing the Tide's match-up with Auburn, and specifically, what Curtis's and George's questions have to say about it. It's pretty much the same thing Will in Pittsburgh had to say about it in the Chris Low mailbag I linked to earlier this week. Neither question mentions the Iron Bowl in any fashion (as don't, I'd imagine, the torrent of similar questions Low makes reference to and Mandel must have gotten to include a representative two). So what do they say about the Iron Bowl? Auburn's chances are better than generally believed.

Why? Because in Bamaland, they're not thinking about those chances at all. The hot topic, to judge from these e-mails and other broad surveys of the Tide landscape--even Todd seems to be spending more time analyzing Florida than the Iron Bowl--isn't the potential respect lost by blowing it at home against Auburn, but the current alleged disrespect shown the Tide by media-types who have Florida anointed the Next Big Thing. To the majority of (though obviously not all) Tide fans, Auburn apparently either doesn't matter, or is a foregone conclusion, or--most likely--some combination of the two.

There are, in my estimation, two reasonable questions to ask in response to this:

1. Uh, how else are Tide fans going to react when they've been feigning disinterest in an Iron Bowl all along that now has no impact on their chances of an SEC championship? Well, I wouldn't expect them to start taking Auburn more seriously, but it's still more-than-debatable if even a win over Florida would get the Tide back into the BCS title after a loss to the 5-6 likes of the Tigers. Looming even larger when you measure the stakes, however, would be the possibility of ending the season with the thud of the streak extended to 7 and the Gators running away with the SEC crown--making the 2008 Tide a kind of glorified version of all those Tennessee squads over the last decade who eked out a division title before losing in Atlanta and being generally forgotten outside of Knoxville.

Also: while there's plenty of time to weigh up Auburn's chances before next Saturday, you would think fans of a team that's already won three games by a touchdown or less (including one in overtime) and been outgained three times as well wouldn't take anyone for granted, much less an archrival that's shown steady improvement over the last month and may be playing for their coach's job. Then again, with Tide fans, you'd think wrong.

2. All this talk about fans. Who cares? What does this have to do with Alabama's actual team? I suppose this next point is debatable, but: it's my opinion that the attitudes of fans towards a particular game are generally reflective of the attitude of their team towards a particular game. If the fans are overconfident and distracted, it's a good bet the team is overconfident and distracted.

What evidence do I offer in support of this? First, a decade of watching Tommy Tuberville's Auburn teams, which routinely played like they expected to breeze past a given opponent as soon as they'd played well enough for the Auburn fanbase to expect them to breeze by an opponent.

Second, there's the simple fact that college football players surely doth pretest too much when they claim they don't pay attention to the press; if you were an 18-22 year-old playing for a team on the verge of a national title, don't you think you'd spend a decent chunk of time finding out what the world thought of your chances to win said title? If the first and foremost thought on the minds of Tide fans is the avalanche of love currently being showered on the Gators, I'll bet dollars to doughnuts it's awfully prominent in the minds of the Tide's players, too.

Third, in the way of hard evidence, there's the Blog Poll's CK Award, which I noted earlier this season has become the college football equivalent of the SI Cover jinx: whether you want to call it "karma" or the inevitable effect of a team's success leading to overconfidence and subsequent failure, teams whose fans have an inflated view of their abilities underperform. It's right there in black-and-white, week after week.

So do Tide fans have an inflated view of Alabama's abilities? Judging by how easily they've been roused into fast-forwarding to the SEC title game, what do you think? Auburn may or may not win, but it seems unlikely from here that the Tigers are going to get the Tide's full focus--or, most importantly, their best game.

Because I just have to point this out: Mandel goes on to actually describe a TV character as being in a "state of destitute." Not a state of destitution. A state of destitute. Apparently, neither the man nor his editors can even tell the difference between an adjective and a noun. Unbelievable.

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Joe,
Longtime reader, first-time commenter — love the blog (sorry ... always wanted to write that).
Just know that Alabama fans like me fear and respect Auburn as much as we're supposed to, have had Auburn in the backs of our minds since Week 1, started thinking about Auburn less than 30 minutes after we left Bryant-Denny Saturday and can't even remember the name of Florida's quarterback at the moment (Tom? Terry? Mitchell?).
As for the team — and this may be the mentality of a fan drinking the Kool-Aid — I honestly think Nick Saban does a wonderful job of keeping the squad insulated from the insanity of its fan base. They've been pretty business-like this year, even in the midst of the insanity at LSU. So I don't anticipate they'll overlook Auburn — and if they do, the coaching staff should put up giant posters with pictures of the six-fingered salutes we all received last November.
See you next Saturday.

wlh

tennessee tiger said...

Why, dbh (or wlh, whatever) has so much fear and respect for Auburn that he can't even remember the name of the blogger (Joe?Jerry?Jingleheimer?Schmidt?) who writes the JCCW.

However, while I find the elephant-lover's comments to be amusing and ironic, I must admit that Saban appears to be the most single-minded robot-like coach on the planet, and if anyone can scare a bunch of 18-22 year old kids into taking their seemingly overmatched opponent seriously, it is him.

It is not, unfortunately, Tubs, as I have witnessed for all but two of the last 10 years (I give passes for 1999 when we were likely never favored and for 2004 when we never lost).

Anonymous said...

Joe,

I find your optimism refreshing. Win or lose, this game is a warm up for Florida. The game will be close as most in the past have been. You probably want to reserve the "They'll over look us." until next week. I could be wrong, but I imagine Alabama's team and fans are looking away this week to avoid Iron Bowl burn out. If next Monday, all talk is on Florida, you should have hope.

Chris F. said...

I've never been one who cared much for the media hype surrounding games or the trash talking. Ultimately, it is the winning or losing on the field that matter.

Jerry Hinnen said...

dbh, I do thank you for reading, and I learned a long time ago to respond to basically any name that starts with a J, so don't sweat that. I won't argue that some Tide fans are as consumed with the Iron Bowl as Auburn fans or more worried about it at the moment than the SECCG; I just think they're in the minority. But, hey, I could be wrong.

As for Saban, I'll get into this more next week, but I think his ability to get his team to focus is maybe overrated; he hasn't been any less vulnerable to upsets than any other SEC coach. (Even his championship team at LSU lost at home to Ron Zook, for instance.)

Trainman, youm ight be right that this is premature. We'll see.