A CBS Sportsline columnist said Alabama football fans and Kentucky basketball fans are the craziest in all of sports.
What’s crazy is for sportswriters, you know people paid by sports fans, to ridicule those same sports fans for supporting their team or you know being fans.
But that’s the idiocy of modern commentary both in sports and politics. Know-it-all sport commentators with no connection to the real world, you know the world where people actually work for a living and don’t get paid to watch a football game, ridicule the very people who pay their salaries.
It is one thing for a commentator to point out when fans behave poorly (parents fighting at little league games), or when something is wrong in the sports world (cheating programs); however, when did loving football become a crime?
Why is it wrong for 92,000 Alabama fans go to the spring game, but it is OK for 70,000 OSU fans or 50,000 Nebraska fans?
What is the cutoff point between acceptable enthusiasm for sports and unacceptable?
The real problem isn’t the underlying fanatic behavior from fans. The problem is the source from where the criticism comes. The chorus of attack emanates almost exclusively from the media elite in New York or Bristol, Conn. These are the next generation of blowhards. Instead of modeling their careers after Dick Schaap or Alf Van Hoose, they want to be a jackass like Keith Olbermann—who covers up his lack of substance with bluster. These new “sports reporters†believe if they shout something long enough and loud enough that it will eventually get someone’s attention.
Instead of being evocative, they are meaningless. They are meaningless because they babble about idiotic things. Who cares if 92,000 fans watched an Alabama scrimmage?
The media elite shouldn’t care. Because those same 92,000 fans in Tuscaloosa and the 70,000 fans in Ohio and the 70,000 fans at Penn St. and the 50,000 fans at Nebraska are the fanatics who pay their salaries.
The only ones who should care are the other SEC schools. Why should they care? Because the spring game is just another tool in the recruiting wars. The Big Red Network illustrated the importance of the spring game to recruiting with a great quote from the Big Ten: “For us, [the spring game is] a recruiting tool. We’ll have a number of our key recruits on campus, as many as we can get on, and put on a presentation for them before the game as well as during the game. And if they can walk in and see 40,000, that’s a lot better than 20,000.” —Wisconsin Head Coach Bret Bielema
And who thinks Saban won’t be able to make similar use of a big A-Day crowd in Tuscaloosa?
