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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.
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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.
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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
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“What is the humane way to hold Penn State accountable for its complicity in the crimes of Jerry Sandusky?” The “death penalty” being referred to in discussions on this topic is a phrase “that is oddly out of proportion. It means that there would be no football team sanctioned by the National Collegiate Athletics Association, not forever but for a couple of years. That Penn State ever got to the point where that could be talked about as the ultimate punishment—something like dying—is part of the problem.” Continue reading…
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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.
