football?


for all the attention that HACAM has paid to alabama's football season, you'd have thought the owners presidents had locked their paid-to-play scholarship athletes out, paving the way for fans to spend more quality time with their families, make up with long lost friends and find mission opportunities in our local and respective communities. those ideas, in an of themselves, are fairly ludicrous. in fact, college football has been played this fall.

as it has happened, i've actually watched most of alabama's games in their entirety. i left work early twice this year to make it home before the 2:30 cbs kick only to watch bama's potential dynasty fall at the hands of stephen freaking garcia and jordan "he's a quarterback now?" jefferson. as the season and the promise of back to back sec and national championships went down in flames courtesy of the two biggest underachievers at quarterback the sec has seen in 10 years, you can understand my lack of want to wax poetic about a team that, on the field, turned out not to be who i thought they were back when i put up this season's only college football preview that mattered. in that column, i feared the idea that auburn would come into today's game with more at stake. i cannot tell you how brutal the reality of that idea coming to fruition is for this alabama fan. not because i hate auburn, mind you, but because i wanted something incredibly special to bookend julio jones career in a way that, no matter the outcome now, cannot happen anymore.

julio jones has been the most prominent recurring character on this blog since it's inception, if you'll allow for the obvious exception of my girls. julio and his coming to alabama marked clearly the end of one era of alabama football and the beginning of something newer, something more polished, something more worthy of the resources my rooting interest of choice possesses. remember when tim tebow chose florida over alabama? of course you do. remember when julio chose alabama over everyone else? of course you do. the next year, trent richardson sealed julio's ("he a pretty big...") deal and chose alabama over florida, signaling not only the end of urban myer's overlord-ship of the sec, but it meant that things like sec championships and the like would now run through tuscaloosa for the foreseeable future. much to my dismay, this season, south carolina and lsu came through t-town, figuratively, and lived to tell the tale. they both navigated through alabama's still young secondary and made their seasons memorable at alabama's expense. it's been a hard pill to swallow.

harder still is that a win today over auburn doesn't mean much of anything for the tide. sure, it would end auburn's national championship hopes, but, for alabama, it's would only be a moral victory. the alabama in my head takes no joy in playing spoiler. it would continue into next season an impressive run of consecutive victories at home. yet, it would only feel fulfilling up until auburn and south carolina met next saturday for the right to carry the sec champion's banner for a year. in my eyes and my eyes only, i almost view the outcome for this alabama football team in today's iron bowl as lose, lose. if they lose to auburn, their state rivals continue a march towards their own dream season that proportionately and historically would mirror alabama's run last year. if they beat auburn, it only shines a brighter light onto the losses in columbia and baton rouge and makes the season's lost relevance seem more substantial.

for julio, if when he declares himself eligible for next spring's nfl draft, the impact will not feel nearly as significant as it should or would have if he could claim two sec and/or national championships on his resume'. instead, he will simply be remembered as the best receiver in the history of the school. that's it. the torch of his legend will quickly be passed to trent and his memory will start to fade. it makes me sad.

today, in the three and a half hours the game will be played, i will root, root, root for the home team, but, if they don't win, it won't be a shame, per se'. it will just be another loss to another good team with flaws that this group of alabama football players and coaches couldn't take advantage of this year. my world will not end.

if they win, though, i hope it's because julio treated the auburn secondary like he did tennessee's. i hope, by the end, he's established himself as the best, pound for pound, player on the field. i hope he can take this game by the horns from his totally dependant position and dominate.

the credibility of my predictions became null and void the moment alabama transformed stephen garcia into brett favre (the good one) and alshon jeffrey into terrell owens (the younger one), so there is no need to predictably fashion a scenario in which alabama wins this game.

i will say this, though. in the meta-narrative that has been the last three years of alabama football, i was right about julio.

and that makes me happy.

roll julio.