Somewhere inside the haze of denial that accompanies an SEC loss (our most recent debacle, to Florida), I began to question the moorings that hold me to the crimson and white. Our fans are legendary for their hubris, and in many cases (read: the Mike Price era) it has proven to be useful in guarding us against ugly realities. But there is a gaunt truth that haunts The Strip after each loss: The more closely we cling to that bravado, of The Bear and of days gone by, the more it hurts when we lose.

So, why?

Why are Alabama fans so obnoxious? Why do we care so much? Why does college football consume us from the inside out?

Go back twenty years. I am but a baby giraffe, and Mama Stretch is pouring M&Ms into a big plastic bowl with one hand and stirring cheese dip with the other. It is a Saturday, and my little brain is riddled with the jarring buzz of four hours of cartoons. I don’t understand the urgency that is hanging thick in the air, but I will in time. Today is an away game, and things don’t bode well for our boys. I follow my mom into the living room, where our sole television is already tuned to the pregame show. She sets the snacks down on the floor and I crawl up onto the couch, where my dad is already sitting. In years to come there will be a house full of giraffes to watch the game, but now, in 1986, there are just three of us. I watch as my mother pulls out her Alabama crimson and white shaker, and twirls it above her head and howls “ROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOLLLLLLLL TIDE ROLL!” as the opening kickoff sails uneventfully out of bounds. Just like she was there. Hundreds of miles away, but she was right there.

“Mama,” I ask, jamming M&Ms into my mouth. I have learned to talk during the commercials.

“Why do we root for Alabama?”

My mother turns to face me.

“Because this is God’s country, son.” She says. “And Alabama is His team.”

That’s how it started for me. Throughout my youth I rose and fell with each week’s game. I spent my nights laying supine on my bed, twirling a football up in the air and then imagining myself soaring above the secondary to snare one of Gary Hollingsworth’s rocket-propelled passes.

Many years later, when I moved to Michigan and enrolled in college, I realized exactly how deep my devotion ran. All around me I was confronted with a different breed of football fan—the Big Ten followers. Only then, surrounded by foreign devotees with allegiances to foreign teams, did I understand how unique SEC football was.

Big Ten fans loved to belittle their southern counterparts, but I didn’t understand why. When Michigan lost a game, people shook their heads and walked out of the stadium. By Sunday afternoon, everyone was fine. In contrast, when Alabama lost a game, the Crimson Nation didn’t start talking about the next week’s game until Thursday, and even then they didn’t forgive the previous game.

Dumb hicks, northerners collectively smirked.

Why do we take it so seriously, to the point that we can be darn near unbearable? Here is what I think is the crux: Because it’s not really about the game. For some, it’s about being a part of something bigger than one’s self. A way for the small man to feel important. To be fair, though, that’s any team in any sport. Alabama football goes much deeper than that.

In the years that followed the Civil War, Alabama was psychologically and financially ruined. Reconstruction was salt in the wound of many a hard line rebel, and the vestiges of the failed coup for independence were everywhere. Southerners were roundly mocked across the divided nation as illiterate, penniless inbreds, capable of nothing but violence.

It wasn’t long before football sprung up along the Eastern seaboard as a game of collegiate status. Alabama, too, fielded a team, but they were considered to be little more than junior varsity competitors.

In 1925, the Crimson Tide strung together an undefeated season and garnered an invitation to the Rose Bowl against a highly favored Washington team. Throughout the North, commentators who resented the upstarts maligned Alabama’s chances in the title game. Little had changed in the public’s perception of the South, and many thought that this southern team would never cross the goal line against the powerful Huskies.

On the eve of the game, the town of Tuscaloosa sent telegrams to the Pasadena hotel of the Alabama players, instructing them that the legacy of the Confederate ghosts—and the future of the entire South—was riding on their performance.

Trailing 12-0 at halftime, Alabama coach Wallace Wade looked at his team and simply said,

“And they told me Southern boys would fight.”

Two hours later, Alabama’s first national championship was in the books, after a stunning 20-19 comeback victory. The South had its heroes: on the train ride back home from Pasadena, Alabama’s ragtag group of 23 players were greeted by throngs of adoring supporters at every stop. For one day, on that muddy field, the Crimson Tide gave the South a reason to stand tall.

Four and a half decades later, a lightly regarded USC team rolled into the Heart of Dixie and manhandled the Tide, 42-21. The difference? The Trojans were an integrated team, while Alabama’s squad reflected the views of segregation that many southerners clung to persistently.

Coach Bear Bryant had seen enough, and due in large part to his influence, Alabama started doling out scholarships to talented black southerners—whether people were “ready” or not. By the time the Bryant dynasty hit its zenith in 1978-79, about a third of Alabama’s team was African-American.

Two teams, two accomplishments. I’m not so starry eyed as to suggest that Alabama football brought the South identity and healed racial wounds, but here’s the thing:

It helped.

And that’s what holds us in place, the crimson phalanx of city hicks with tattered ‘Bama ballcaps slung low over our shy eyes. We cannot abandon this team because of what it stood for to our fathers and our grandfathers. When we boldly predict (as I annually do) that each Alabama year will be The Year, it’s not an ultimatum. We won’t run and hide when the Tide gets smacked around in The Swamp. We are inexorably bound to the team that helped to define what it meant to be a southerner.

Here’s what’s more: even in Tuscaloosa, it’s not just about the Tide. The entire SEC is an integral part of southern identity. When LSU won their national title, Crimson Nation stood by, quietly proud. When Tennessee won their championship years before, Alabama fans silently rejoiced. When Florida won their title before that, well…Crimson Nation was probably hoping they would lose. Let’s not get crazy here.

So the next time a drunken crimson-clad partisan pulls out the Trump of all trump cards by citing the national championships that belong to The Capstone, take it with a grain of salt. Alabama football isn’t really about the titles. We think it is, but it’s not. It’s about Wesley Britt declining to be a Playboy All-American because he didn’t want little boys to associate him with the magazine. It’s about Gene Stallings coaching with his Down syndrome son Johnny by his side. It’s about Jay Barker lingering on the field after games and timing his postgame interview so that the cameras could show him joining the prayer circle at midfield.

It’s about a somber Jamie Christensen sitting with a shaken Leigh Tiffin after the Arkansas meltdown so the freshman wouldn’t have to face the reporters alone.

That’s why Alabama fans are so obnoxious. That, and the fact that this is God’s country and we are His team.

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