Nick Saban coaches football at Alabama … you knew that. So you probably also know that he’s a chap ass. In sports, the best coaches, the ones that seem to win the most are almost always prickly jerks (Belichick, Popovich, Bobby Knight … I could go on). Anywho, Saban is irritated because Alabama fans never stay for the whole game. Why should they? In recent skirmishes, they played New Mexico State and Western Carolina and something called Mercer. They typically win games by sixty-five points and the average coed gets thirsty and bored and, well, horny, so they leave at halftime. By halftime of most Alabama games, the third-stringers are in and when the coach pulls the starters isn’t that the universal code to leave the stadium, that the outcome of the game has been decided?

Saban wants fans, especially the students, to stay ’til the bitter end. He says that people leaving early hurts recruiting because when high school recruits come to an Alabama home game and then only see lots of empty/abandoned seats they just might pick another school – because pampered football prospects need to be fully idolized by adoring, standing-room-only crowds. Saban’s afraid that if there is one empty seat that recruits might start to believe that better, more popular teams may be playing in places other than Tuscaloosa and, holy hell, what if the high school heartthrobs started going elsewhere?

So Saban and Alabama developed a smartphone app (for real). Students download it, take it to games and if the app detects that the person is at the game and in his seat for the entire game the dude gets points and, I assume, gets a Roll Tide T-shirt or something else of zero monetary value.

Okay, let me get this straight:

• I’m only a good fan if endure every second of every Alabama football game, even the 85-0 shellacking of the Lamar University Cardinals (wasn’t Lamar a character on Sanford & Son?)?
• Every lost recruit is my fault because I had the nerve to leave my seat, even though I can prove that I have a medical bladder issue?
• If I let the University of Alabama track me via electronic surveillance, if I surrender my privacy rights on Fall Saturdays then I’ll be considered an investor in good standing by the Crimson Tide mafia?

Between TV rights and merchandise sales and national championship bonus checks and SEC revenue sharing Alabama football has a nice little financial foundation … so if you want me to stay in my fuckin’ seat why don’t you pay me? If their biggest problem is fan apathy, or maybe more accurately fan blow-out fatigue there are better alternatives than “fan tracking.”

How about this Alabama, if you don’t like the way billionaire boosters and privileged students act at your football games why not make all game tickets free? That way when someone gets tired of Alabama touchdowns they can leave and simply hand their ticket to a person outside who can come in and fill their seat? This way, maybe some of Alabama’s less fortunate citizens will have a chance to see a game and since the average working-class person is less likely to have a champagne brunch waiting for him outside the stadium, perhaps he’ll be more likely to remain at the game regardless of the score.

The Alabama head coach says that if you want to be “number one” everybody needs to do their part, players, coaches and fans. And for fans that means keeping their seats until the final whistle so that impressionable recruits will think highly of the University of Alabama.

Well, Nick, I say that Alabama fans pay your salary … if they wanna come late to games and leave early, if they want to boo your play-calling, if they want to make fun of your AFLAC commercial and Tweet out that the AFLAC duck has more personality than you, then all you get to do is say, “Thank you, sir, may I have another.”

These fans, “your boss”, worship at your altar, treat you like a king, adopt your point of view like the lemmings they are – and this is the thanks they get? If they let you tell them when they can and cannot leave their seats; if they sign-up to let you put a GPS tag in their ear like some kind of endangered, elk then what’s next?

Slow you Roll Tide.

Photo credit: kschlot1 on Visualhunt / CC BY