Sitting here on a Saturday evening in the dead of summer, and ESPN wants to talk about 100 days until kickoff, all these predictions and storylines and who's the favorite. And I cannot help but think about what we have lost. I remember when the summer meant you would drive past the stadium and see the lights on at 6 AM, hear the pads popping through the fence, know that the walk-ons were getting after it before the scholarship guys even rolled out of bed. Now it is all about who bought the best roster through the portal and which NIL collective cut the biggest check.
You want to know what I miss most on a night like this? The old Bryant-Denny Stadium before they put in the upper deck, before the jumbotron, before the suites. I remember sitting in the south end zone bleachers in 1989, the metal so hot you could fry an egg on it by noon, and the smell of cigar smoke and boiled peanuts mixing together in the September humidity. That was real. That was football. You could hear the coaches yelling from the sideline, you could feel the ground shake when the student section started stomping during the 4th quarter. We did not need a DJ or a hype video or a light show. We had the Million Dollar Band playing "Yea Alabama" and the sound of 60,000 people losing their minds when we stuffed a run on 3rd and short.
The 1992 natty season, I will never forget the Tennessee game that year. The old stadium was shaking, I mean literally shaking, when we stopped them on that goal line stand. You could not hear yourself think for three hours after the game. That is what I miss. The raw, unfiltered, organic passion of a stadium full of people who had been waiting all week, all year, all their lives for that moment. Not a bunch of fans scrolling through their phones during timeouts trying to figure out which transfer portal kid is visiting next week.
The new stadium is beautiful, I will give them that. The LED ribbons, the club level, the concourses with air conditioning. But something died when they put in all that luxury. The students used to be right on top of the field, you could see the sweat on the players' faces. Now they are sshoved up in the corner somewhere while the corporate boxes take over. Coach Stallings used to say the 12th man was the crowd, and he meant it. We won games in the 90s because opposing teams could not hear their own snap counts.
I look at what college football has become, this ESPN piece about 100 days and all the talk about Oregon and their five-stars and Georgia and their recruiting rankings, and I just think about what we had. The purity of it. The simplicity. The way a Saturday in Tuscaloosa used to feel like a religious experience, not a business transaction. We have traded the soul of the game for flash and money and I am not sure we will ever get it back.