Their young fans only have Saban as realty, too young to remember the other coaches before Saban and how Bama was a punching bag after Stallings retired. Trivia: Mike Price used a UA credit card to pay for the strip club deal right here in Pensacola while on a recruiting trip. Those were funny times.
Sitting in the stadium, I told my son, who is great except for his Alabama fandom, that he's grown up in a college football era that isn't normal. After Bear Bryant died, from 1983 to 2008, a full 25 years, Alabama won a single national title and just three SEC championships. Under Nick Saban, Alabama's title contention seemed like a birthright, but some Alabama fans reading this now remember those long years of futility, decades where the Tide went from one ill-chosen coach to another. Heck, when one coach, Mike Price, even got fired before he coached a team because of a strip club trip, among other things, that featured the immortal line, "It's rolling, baby, it's rolling!"
Alabama even had a coach leave for Texas A&M.
In the dead of night!
Hell, Phil Fulmer and Tennessee owned the Tide, running up a 9-1 stretch over a decade. If you were an eight-year-old Alabama fan in 1995, you grew to adulthood with Tennessee ruining your fall almost every year. Heck, Tommy Tuberville won six, SIX!, Iron Bowls in a row and ran Mike Shula out of town.
Yes, Nick Saban came and changed everything, by year two, mind you, but lingering in the back of the mind of any Alabama fan thirty or older is the recollection of what it was like in those dark years, when nothing seemed to go right and Alabama searched with futility for a coach to replace the Bear.
Clay Travis didn't like what he saw from Alabama in their road game at Florida State.
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