This is an opinion column.
I got a text from my son this week reminding me it was time. Time to prepare.
“Let’s work on some recipes soon to get ready,” he wrote.
He was talking about fish soup. Cioppinos and Bouillabaisses and chowders. Not because we are culinary masters, but because it was our duty.
We failed Alabama last year. We will not fail again.
You see, seafood has been our superstitious game-day meal for Alabama football games ever since the traditional barbecue died to us in 2013’s notorious Kick Six game against Auburn. Seafood has been good to us, and to the Tide.
Until Jan. 7 of this year, when Clemson made chowder of Bama. Alabama fans point to all sorts of reasons for the disaster. Some even use the excuse that “Clemson was really good.” But my son Ramsey and I know the truth. It was our fault.
Because the rustic Mediterranean fish stew we made for that title game was not championship caliber. We didn’t bring our A game. We didn’t do the little things. We didn’t leave it all on the field.
So Clemson ran through Alabama, as Coach Nick might put it, like poop through a tin horn.
Now, football is practically upon us again. SEC Media Days begin in Hoover next week, marking the moment when Alabama – all of the South – will tune in, turn on and get tricked out for football.
It is time to get better. Time to correct the mistakes of the past. It is time to run faster, study smarter, lift more, and … cook better.
Know your role.
I can’t help but think, every time football season starts, what our world would be like if we all put as much effort into the state of Alabama as we did our football teams. We wouldn’t tolerate a squad, or a coach, that put as little effort into success as our political leaders.
When Nick Saban saw the world – led by Auburn’s Gus Malzahn — adapting to his defenses with wide open hurry-up offenses he changed his ingredients and his coaching philosophy so he could stay a step ahead.
Alabama political leaders, on the other hand, go into each political season asking not how Alabama can compete with states with better economies and standards of living, but how to defend the ways that aren’t working.
Saban and Malzahn and every other successful coach know that recruiting is the key to winning.
Alabama politicians claim they want to recruit industry and opportunity, but every year they dig their own pitfalls, with divisive issues that alienate women and minorities and dehumanize people and convince companies that need only a whiff of controversy to coax them to look elsewhere.
Nick Saban will make more than $8 million this year, and Malzahn more than $6 million. It seems absurd, in a state where the median income for complete households is less than $50,000 – about half a percent of Saban’s annual take.
But the universities and football officials know something Alabama politicians are too timid or short-sighted to see. If you want to compete, if you want to improve, if you want to put a better product on the field or in constituent lives you must invest in it.
Football fans know passionately to do their part, too, to show up, to cheer or boo, or to simply make a better stew.
Not when it comes to the affairs of government, though. It seems, too often, we don’t have time to even pay attention.
That puts us all in a fine kettle of fish.
John Archibald, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is a columnist for Reckon by AL.com. His column appears in The Birmingham News, the Huntsville Times, the Mobile Register and AL.com. Write him at jarchibald@al.com.
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