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.