The University of Alabama Jefferson County Alumni Chapter is screening the film “Red Tails” Friday at 7 p.m. at the Patton Creek Rave Theater, according to a Facebook event invite. It’s the movie Coach Nick Saban showed the Alabama football team the night before the 14th National Championship against LSU.

Watch the first public promotional trailer for the feature film above, and notice the commander says: “We need pilots who will put bombers before themselves.”

Another indication that an individual sacrificing for the team is NOT Socialism, as some Republicans and conservative news outlets would have you believe.

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Tom Campbell

A Saban Hoodoo Wink?

Alabama Crimson Tide Once Again Invited to the White House

President Barack Obama called University of Alabama football Coach Nick Saban on Thursday to congratulate him and the university on their BCS National Championship and their exceptional 2011-2012 season, according to an e-mail press release from the White House.

The President said that he watched the entire championship game and could not have been more impressed with the Crimson Tide’s performance.

Mr. Obama commended the coach on his outstanding record and said that he looks forward to congratulating the team in person at the White House.

From the economy to the environment, success depends on commitment…

The Big Picture
by Glynn Wilson

Now that Alabama’s achieved the ultimate success by winning the national football championship, and everybody by now should be aware of coach Nick Saban’s famous mission statement about “excellence” that made it possible, don’t you wonder what it would take to translate that lesson into other aspects of life in this state and country?

How about our stumbling economy? Our bumbling political system? Our ineffective energy and environmental policies?

Tom Campbell

A Saban Hoodoo Wink?

Since there’s no good place available on the Web through Google to find a full text version of Saban’s mission statement for the Crimson Tide, and in case any of our readers who are not football fans missed it, I’ve grabbed it from here and retyped it to post below so anybody in the world can find it.

“Our mission statement here is to create an atmosphere and environment for everyone to be able to succeed, first of all as a person. We want players to be more successful in life because they were involved in our program, by the principles and values that we’re able to develop with them so that they can be successful relative to the character and attitude they have as a football player here at this institution.

“The second thing is we want to be successful as students. I always tell players in recruiting, there’s two things that we want you to do here, you’ve got two careers: one on the field, one off the field. The one off the field means you got to graduate from college. That’s the one that’s going to have the greatest impact on the quality of your life forever. We want to have a great academic support program. We want our players to succeed as students.

“The third is this. We want them to be the best football player they can be. We want every guy to reach their full potential as a football player, play together as a team, know how important it is to be a part of a team and fulfilling your role to that team.

“The last thing is to use all the resources this institution has to help everyone launch their career when they have represented this institution, when they leave this institution, so they can be the most successful in their life because of their association with this university and the people that have made this university great.”

Saban didn’t come up with this philosophy over night. In 2004, he wrote a book called How Good Do You Want to Be?

In the how-to memoir, Saban shares his winning philosophy for creating and inspiring success, revealing things that would help anybody succeed at work and in life. He says “excellence” doesn’t happen overnight. It comes from hard work, consistency, the drive to be the best and a passion for what you do.

Some of the insights include:

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Tom Campbell

Saban flashes a knowing smile and wink after Ingram won the Heisman Saturday night…

Under the Microscope
by Glynn Wilson

Somewhere in the great divide between religion and science there exists the uniquely American game called football — and the practice of voodoo.

Nick Saban knows a thing or two about football, and if there’s any truth to certain urban legends spreading around the “Internets,” he may have learned a thing or two about voodoo during his five-year stint coaching LSU down on the bayou.

You can’t live in that damn swamp without finding out a little about Hoodoo, gris, gris and the rest, as I learned in my four years of living in New Orleans, as did my good friend Rick Bragg, who was there at the same time.

They say college football is a religion in the Deep South, especially in places like Louisiana and Alabama, but according to Bragg, “it’s not. Only religion is religion.”

“Anyone who has seen an old man rise from his baptism, his soul all on fire, knows as much, though it is easy to see how people might get confused,” Bragg wrote in Sports Illustrated when Nick Saban announced he would take the head coaching job at Alabama — after telling the people of Louisiana and Florida he never would.

“If football were a faith anywhere, it would be here on the Black Warrior River in Tuscaloosa, Ala.,” Bragg wrote. “And now has come a great revival.”

When the announcement went out Saturday night that running back Mark Ingram had won the University of Alabama’s first Heisman Trophy, the news traveled over the Internets faster than the old church bells could ring across the Old South.

The Alabama faithful sent e-mail messages and text messages to their groups of friends. Bloggers posted news links, photos and comments. And the social Networking sites of Facebook and Twitter lit up like Christmas tree lights with tweets supporting Ingram with the now infamous acronym RTR, short for Roll Tide Roll!

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