The unofficial online home for fans of the UAB Blazers. Part of Collegiate Sports Nation (CSN).

Quote:This is representative of why I now have trouble saying “Roll Tide”, why I quietly hope Bama has a mediocre football season, why I now quietly hold my tongue or give passive apologetic defenses of our academic program whenever someone bashes the University of Alabama. Because most of the time, they are right on the money.
I went to an incredible school, and I am lucky for that. I had brilliant teachers, talented classmates with bright futures, and challenging and engaging classes. But I've long since realized that’s not what we seem to care most about, because that’s not what the culture of the school places stock in. Instead of gracefully displaying our status as one of the top research institutions in the south, year after year we insist on being a source of national embarrassment, the darkest mark in a state that is already struggling with a tarnished reputation. It’s one thing to desire a successful sports team, to have school spirit, to have pride even if the accomplishments you’re celebrating really have zero reflection on anything you’ve done. But it’s another to always need to be the very best, whatever the cost, at something so inane, so arbitrary, so completely fleeting as college football.
Something changes when you decide to pay a coach seven million dollars a year, and then donate money for his mortgage on top of that. You become something other than a group of students and their supporters playing a game. You become a professional sports team whose fans sometimes get lost on the way to the game and end up in a classroom. You gain a following of desperate people looking for anything to cling to, willing to poison the oak trees of a rival as a matter of pride. You turn a blind eye to real problems, because you think another championship ring in January will hide the shame of a racist Greek organization and a university president who treats outdated comedians with rape allegations as her token black friend, or donates to the campaigns of local politicians propped up by election fraud. You get a board of trustees willing to let a smaller, under represented system school’s team get wiped off the face of the earth at the cost of jobs, infrastructure, and dozens of recruited students, merely because of old grudges and the impossible standard of being compared to the biggest sports powerhouse in the nation. The same board of trustees who has held the drinking water of hundreds of thousands of Birmingham residents hostage for nearly a decade now over a coal mine. You spout off numbers about enrollment increases, never stopping to question if the sort of students who enter a college because of its football team’s success are really the sort of people you want on campus in the first place. You talk about economic development in Tuscaloosa, as if 7 weekends a year in tourism revenue has completely transformed the city from a wasteland into an oasis of culture and prosperity, blind to unsustainable real estate developments popping up like whack-a-moles. This. This is the Saban effect right here.
It’s just ******* football, and until the University of Alabama learns to realize that, which I doubt we ever will, UAB deserves a team a hell of a lot more than we do."

I agree with some of the points but there's an element the writer totally misses. The campus experience of having an on-campus football stadium and program. The TCU AD spoke on football revenue on CSPAN and indicates the number AND QUALITY of students increased significantly at TCU with the decision to improve their football facilities and attract better players.

wow....that is impressive

I wasn't quite sure where the piece was going during the second paragraph, but that last paragraph brings it.

Good points.