Tire Store Report -- SEC Championship

Well, it’s been nearly a week and we are still pretty much beside ourselves down here.  Last Saturday evening in Atlanta the University of Alabama football team once again earned the right to raise a new flag over its stadium as the reigning champion of far and away the best conference in college football.  (You don’t have to take our word for it, 11 of the 13 eligible teams are heading for bowl games and 8 ended up ranked in the final regular season Top 25.)  That makes 27 SEC Championships for Alabama, 31 counting when it was still called the Southern Conference.

In this case, though, getting there was not half the fun.  A fine Georgia football team gave its best effort of the season and led Alabama late in the game.  Again.  In fact, in two games plus an overtime this year Alabama has led Georgia for exactly one minute and four seconds of game time.

Alabama made enough mistakes Saturday to have lost twice to a team of this caliber.  Think about it.  The team managed to fumble three times (including once on the goal line), throw two interceptions (one in the end zone / one inside the five), rough the punter, have first and goal at the six and come up with no points, get flagged for too many men on the field, go 0-for-the-first-three-quarters on third down, be regularly beaten at the line of scrimmage, lose the starting quarterback (and SEC player of the year) to not one but two injured ankles (including one stepped on by the best offensive lineman in the country), miss recovering a badly botched kickoff catch, give up a 35-yard kick return after scoring to take a late lead, flat out drop three passes (one, and perhaps two, of which would have gone the distance), drop an interception that the defensive back got two hands on with enough fake green grass ahead of him to feed a herd of fake goats….  That’s enough.  Our blood pressure is going up like an overfull inner tube in the sunshine.

The wonder of this game isn’t that Alabama trailed at the half; it’s that Alabama only trailed by one touchdown at the half.

Still, though, Alabama won.   And it won in a fashion that we would have called “improbable” and “amazing” but we overworked those words so badly after the Alabama Georgia game back in January that we gave them the rest of the year off. 

It’s hard to get a handle on how the game transpired.  The defense played not very well at all giving up 28 points, right up until the last 27 minutes of the game when it held the Bulldogs scoreless.  The running game got stuffed at the line of scrimmage, except when it was blowing through the line for critical chunk gains.  We overlooked about 4,367 opportunities to check down or throw swing passes to running backs who looked like they had stayed out on the playground after the recess bell rang, but caught passes in windows too tight to fit a football through.  The kicking game…. Never mind.

In the immortal words of W.C. Fields, “I saw it with my own eyes and I still don’t believe it.”

We know everyone else has done so, but the good thing about a dead horse is that it doesn’t mind being beaten.  So we’ll give a tip of the tire-grimed cap to Jalen Hurts.  Whatever else you might say about him the young man has shown class, loyalty, character, courage, tenacity, perseverance, and just plain old cussed determination.  He was the SEC Offensive player of the year and has found ways to improve his game.  If hard work will get it done, we wouldn’t bet against him at anything and mostly we aren’t talking about football.  He selflessly stuck with his team when a lot of other players would have chosen a different route -- we know because they did so.  Hurray for you, Jalen.

Commissioner, you did such an able job chronicling this game that we find very little to add to your efforts.  Thank you for a job well done, this week and all this season.

And so the regular season has come to an end.  It went all too fast.  Seems like just the other day we were sweltering away on the asphalt glad to be doing changes, rotations, and balances just to keep us occupied through the dog days of August till the season began.  And here we are, in the cold time of the year when the grease rack and the front parking lot stay empty as people who should be spending money on a new set of tires spend it instead on another bathrobe for Aunt Matilda that she won’t wear and a video game or two where they’ll get stuck on level three and shove it to the back of the cabinet for good.  The football seasons seem to slip by a little faster each year and occasionally the mind wanders around to just how many more we’ll get to see.  No one knows the answer to that question, of course, so we plan to enjoy the tail end of this one for all it is worth.  We hope you do, too.

In the meantime, Christmas will come and go.  So from all of us down here at the Tire Store -- me, the Comptroller, the lug nut crew, Big Willie, J.D., Pee Wee, Pops, Mr. Poole, and Moses -- Merry Christmas.  May God bless you all.

Roll Tide.  Beat Oklahoma.

 



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