Reeves Wiedeman on Alabama’s win over Notre Dame in last night’s B.C.S. championship game:

In case you fell asleep, Alabama beat Notre Dame by twenty-eight points in last night’s college-football national championship. Even that score suggests that the game was closer than it was. By the start of the second quarter, Alabama had twenty-one points. Notre Dame had twenty-three yards. By the third, lines were already forming at sporting-goods stores in Alabama to pick up official championship gear. By the end of the fourth, Alabama head coach Nick Saban had pulled his starters, unofficially instituting the mercy rule. When Alabama is on defense, the school’s Million Dollar Band often plays “Look Down,” from “Les Misérables.” Feelings about the movie aside, Alabama would have been kind to heed the song’s opening line: “Look down, look down, and see the beggars at your feet / Look down and show some mercy if you can.”

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/VMRdxi

Photograph by Chris O’Meara/AP.

Reeves Wiedeman on Paul Finebaum, a sports talk-radio host in Birmingham whose show has become the voice of college football in Alabama, and throughout much of the South. 

+ Listen to the recordings of some of Finebaum’s most notorious calls: http://nyr.kr/TMOW4m

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.

Reeves Wiedeman:

In this week’s magazine, I wrote about Paul Finebaum, a sports talk-radio host in Birmingham whose show has become the voice of college football in Alabama, and throughout much of the South. But Finebaum is merely the lead tenor among the often cacophonous chorus made up of his regular callers, whom he admits are the show’s stars. Many of them are capable of clear, coherent arguments. Others, less so. 
 

…after several months of listening to the show, I find myself still coming back to the bar, hoping that my favorite regulars stop by. Below are clips—warning, foul language ahead—from the show’s most prominent, and notorious, callers: http://nyr.kr/TMOW4m

In this week’s issue, Reeves Wiedeman writes about the Alabama talk-radio host Paul Finebaum, whose football show has made Birmingham’s WJOX the second-highest-rated sports station in the country. We sent the photographer Lauren Lancaster to the epicenter of college-football mania to photograph the man Wiedeman describes as “an unlikely candidate for the voice of the South” at the Iron Bowl last month, where Alabama crushed Auburn, 49 to 0. Click-through for a slideshow: http://nyr.kr/SNiQWM

Occupy the B.C.S.

To the ever-growing list of life’s certainties—death, taxes, fourth-quarter comebacks by Tim Tebow—we can now add annual complaints about college football’s Bowl Championship Series. Last night, a panel of human voters, prone, as a species, to mistakes, and computers, prone, as devices, to a lack of emotion, selected Louisiana State and Alabama as title-game opponents. This means we will get to watch the Game of the Century again, two months after the last one, even if the first one, in which no one scored a touchdown, barely registered as the Game of the Evening.

- Reeves Wiedeman takes on the B.C.S.: http://nyr.kr/sQjIZB. If you’re on Twitter, click here to follow our newly launched @SportingScene account.
  

LSU vs. Alabama: Game of Which Century?

[ESPN] has covered every possible angle of tomorrow’s game, stopping just shy of examining the relative strengths of each university’s nineteenth-century literature programs. (We’ll give the nod to Alabama for the English department’s motto: “Totally making you read.”) ESPN’s various “All-Access” segments this week have informed us that L.S.U. coach Les Miles drinks between two and five cups of coffee each day and Alabama coach Nick Saban listens to Michael Jackson on the way to work in the morning. Natural vs. aural caffeination: let’s call that one a draw.

Reeves Wiedeman discusses tomorrow night’s “Game of the Century”: http://nyr.kr/rKwlhx