Editor’s Note: While the people of the Gulf Coast are still hurting from the BP oil and chemical disaster, it is a fact that humans need a break from serious news and tragedy. With that said, it is that time of year again, time to kick off our weekly college football column we run every Friday to make it easy on the Web to find out what games are on television, an easy click to check the time and network. This is put together every week by long-time sports writer and columnist Dan Rutledge, who wrote for Gulf Coast Newspapers for about 30 years before retiring after Hurricane Ivan devastated the Alabama coast.
Time Out
by Dan Rutledge
Isn’t life grand? For many of us here down South and not quite as many elsewhere in these United States of America, life is wonderful once the college football season gets underway.
College football is a fix for the jitters caused by trying to deal with the everyday bull hockey (insert S-word) of living. Much like a little heroin does for a junkie, football takes its addicts away from the “real” world and its many problems.
Now, for a while — say through the December-January bowl season — we can forget about things like global warming and associated disasters like the melting of the polar ice caps, 2012 scenarios of doom, assaults on the 14th Amendment, unemployment, the economy, Islamaphobia, the oil spill and related environmental disasters not yet realized and many other worries that suck up our attention and plague our consciousness.
Now we only have to be concerned about how our team and conference fared last week and who’s coming up next Saturday (or, with games now scheduled for TV, Thursday, Friday, and every other day/night of the week).
It might be a better world if everyone all over the globe got hypnotized by football and if football season lasted year round. People are always putting down sports in general, saying that it is a waste of time. Not true.
Alabama Coach Nick Saban visits Gulf Shores and Orange Beach Friday to see first hand what the affects the oil spill is having on Alabama’s coast.
Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft and Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon took the Coach on a tour of the area and Coach Saban visited with Charter Boat Captains at Zeke’s Marina.
Armando Galarraga of the Detroit Tigers lost his bid for a perfect game Wednesday night with two outs in the ninth inning on a call that first base umpire Jim Joyce later admitted he blew.
The nation’s best sports columnist, Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post, says:
Yes, they booed President Obama at Nationals Park on Monday. And he deserved it…
He began, after toeing the rubber, by pumping his arms several times without continuing the motion; had a runner been on base, the umpire may well have called a balk. Finally, Obama completed his delivery, using the familiar motion some commentators (certainly not this one) have in the past derided as a “girl toss.” The ball floated, slowly and with great loft, in the general direction of home plate, but — metaphor alert! — wild and far to the left….
President Barack Obama was presented with a University of Alabama football jersey during a ceremony on Monday honoring the national champion Crimson Tide football team in the East Room of the White House.
The President highlighted one of the team’s trademarks, their unwavering focus on what’s important.
“Coach Saban asked his players if they wanted to work hard enough to beat their teammates in a drill, or if they wanted to work hard enough to be the best team in the country. And it’s pretty clear what choice they made,” President Obama said. “That’s the kind of tone this team sets, both on and off the field.”
“It’s why these young men — and this is something I’m very proud of — had the second highest graduation rate of any team ranked in the top 25,” the president added. “It shows that these guys have their priorities straight. Together, they contributed more than 3,500 hours of community service that Alabama students — student athletes performed last year.”
And that spirit continued earlier today, when the team met with a group of kids from one of D.C.’s roughest neighborhoods, and helped teach them about the importance of staying in school and making healthy choices,” the president said.
“That’s how champions act,” he said, “in football and in life.”
Hoarse, hungover and happy, New Orleans woke up Monday wondering if that first ever Super Bowl victory really happened. In the French Quarter, stragglers — decked out in Saints jerseys and team colors — remaining from the all-night party turned to coffee and beignets as dawn broke, according to the Associated Press.
There was hope the Saints winning season would help revitalize New Orleans, still not fully recovered from the devastation of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.
There’s much talk on the radio and the Web about the hit that knocked Texas Quarterback Colt McCoy out of the national championship game, but very little mention of the fact that Alabama Quarterback Greg McElroy was playing with two broken ribs.
“I cracked my ribs in the third quarter against Florida,” McElroy said outside the locker room in Pasadena, according to ESPN. “Two of them — the ninth and the 10th. Left side. It’s bad. I got it numbed up before the game and it was killing me at halftime.”
Which brings up an interesting question about the relationship between the media in Alabama and the team’s need for secrecy. For two days, the ABC affiliate in Birmingham, the station with the broadcast rights to the game, ran packages asking “what if?” one of the teams’ quarterbacks were injured and had to leave the playing field.
Did the sports broadcasters in Alabama know McElroy had cracked ribs? This injury was never revealed in any news story before the game. What if they knew and kept it quiet?
McElroy certainly didn’t look like the same quarterback who went 12-for-18 for 239 yards in the SEC championship game victory over the Florida Gators in Atlanta.
There’s an empty spot on the walk of fame at Alabama for Nick Saban, who brought Alabama back to the national championship in the Rose Bowl and coached the university’s first Heisman Trophy winner, Mark Ingram
by Glynn Wilson
The University of Alabama Crimson Tide is back on top of the football world, hanging on to prevail over the Texas Longhorns in a game of unexpected twists and turns, including the early hit by Marcel Dareus that knocked Quarterback Colt McCoy out of the national championship game in the first quarter.
Dareus later scored on a 28-yard interception return just before halftime, earning him the award for defensive player of the game.
“I was thinking about grabbing the guy with the ball, but then I said, `Let me just grab this football.’ I wasn’t even thinking about the highlight,” Dareus, a native of Birmingham who played at Huffman High School, said after the game. “I was so excited. My legs were weak, my muscles were crazy, and I made it.”
This Alabama team will go down in football history for going through 14 games undefeated and for Mark Ingram’s Heisman trophy, Alabama’s first. Ingram earned offensive player of the game honors for running for 116 yards and two touchdowns. His roommate, Trent Richardson, ran for 109 yards and two touchdowns.
The No. 1 Crimson Tide held off a rally by second-ranked Texas and beat the Longhorns 37-21 on Thursday night in the BCS title game with help from a late fumble recovery by Courtney Upshaw at the Texas 3-yard line. Ingram scored a clinching touchdown from 1 yard out with just about two minutes left in the game.
The victory makes Alabama head coach Nick Saban, now called Saint Nick in Alabama, the first coach to win BCS titles at two universities, Alabama and LSU.
During the Bush years, we specialized in covering the politicization of the U.S. justice system as much as any news organization. Our archives are about the most comprehensive for anyone researching the prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman, and the original case against Richard Scrushy, which Glynn Wilson covered for The New York Times.
