This earlier post noted the rather obsessive behavior of numerous University of Alabama football fans as they followed the University’s courtship of former Miami Dolphins head coach, Nick Saban. This Tuscaloosa News article covers the greeting of Saban at the local airport by hundreds of the ‘Bama faithful, which included the frisky female fan who managed to plant a welcome kiss on Saban pictured on the left. As the article notes, she wasn’t the only female fan who was overwhelmed by the presence of the new Lord of Alabama Football:

Colette Connell, one of the more exuberant fans at the airport, even had her own Saban cheer: ìPraise the Lord, God is so good, Nick is now in the Bama hood.”
Later that day, Connell was arrested for driving under the influence.

After you get done playing a game of Teasip Bingo, take a moment to read this report on the Texas Longhorns’ tough loss to the Texas Aggies by longtime Horns fan Ida Mae Crimpton, who writes regular reports on her beloved Horns from her perch in Elgin just east of Austin. Here’s a part of what Ida Mae had to say about the Horns’ most recent tough loss:

With Colt coming back off of his injury and since we were just playing the Aggies, no one really seriously thought that there was a possibility that we could lose. But when the game was finally over and we’d lost, a funny thing happened; Mack didn’t seem to be too bothered. He went to midfield, shook coach Frangipani’s hand and then led the team back to the locker room. Coach Chizik told Earl what happened next. Mack gave the guys a post game talk like he usually did but this one was different because of what he talked about. He told the guys not to worry too much about losing because there were other things more important than winning, like God, family, the Gross National Product, the danger posed by international communism, and erosion (which, if you stop to think about it, really is a problem in some areas of south Texas). Well, needless to say, there were more than one set of eyes rolling around that room as everybody tried to figure out what the heck the coach was talking about. Then, Mack told the whole team that they were invited to his house for cherry cheesecake and Frescas, which sent Sally into a panic when she heard about it because they didn’t have any cherry cheesecake in the house and if the team did come over they’d just have to settle for Nabisco Honey Grahams with canned cake frosting (one of Mack’s favorite snacks). But after Mack left, coach Chizik spoke to the team and told them that it probably wouldn’t be a good night to drop by Mack’s house and that maybe they could take a rain check.

Read the entire hilarious piece, and also Ida Mae’s other priceless reports on the Horns’ season, particularly this priceless report on the Horns’ recent loss to Kansas State.
You gotta love football in Texas.

The Houston Texans recent improved play is not being noticed yet in Austin, at least according to this letter from a local Austin television programing director to Texans fan Brian over at Longhorn Law:

The last Texans game we aired (last Sunday) was tuned-in by just 21,000 households in Austin (a city with 589,000 households). By comparison, the Titans game we aired on Oct 8th (after Vince Young became quarterback) was watched by over 53,000 households (152% more football fanís homes). At one point during that game there were as many as 68,000 households tuned in. It was the most-watched ìearlyî game weíve aired all season. Actually, that game was watched by more Austin fans than any Texans game weíve aired going all the way back to October of last season – with two notable exceptions. The first is when the Texans played the Cowboys on October 15th (which you could expect to be highly watched) and the other, honestly, was when the Texans played the Titans on October 29th. [. . .]

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Year in and year out, the Southeastern Conference is the most competitive of the major college football conferences.
Reflecting that intense competition, you may recall this item from earlier this year in which an Auburn University professor charged that another university professor and the Auburn athletic department had engaged in academic fraud for the purpose of ensuring the eligibility of a large number of Auburn football players.
Those competitive fires boiled over again a couple of weeks ago when an Auburn football team laptop containing the team’s confidential playbook turned up missing the week before Auburn played South Carolina in a big game. Although Auburn initially feared that South Carolina would end up with the missing playbook, it turned out that a homeless man had lifted the computer and it was returned to the Auburn team.
All of that leads to this Onion article that reports that the playbook was actually returned in, might we say, slightly altered form.
And, just to emphasize that truth is often stranger than fiction in the SEC, this State.com article reports that South Carolina head coach Steve Spurrier dressed down one of his assistant coaches during the post-game press conference after the Gamecocks won this past week against Kentucky. Spurrier followed up that dressing-down with this apology. At least I think that’s an apology.