Alabama Football Attitude Adjustment underway!!!

I read this story today on the web. It seems that Coach Saban is upsetting some people from the press. Now, that is a real heartbreaker for them I'm sure (insert sarcasm here). The press never rates high on my list of people to respect, but that's a different story altogether. The story speaks about closing practice to outsiders, like this is some "new" trend. Here is the line around which a lot of the story revolves, " Scrimmages are closed except for those exciting few minutes at the beginning during ... stretching."

One of the most memorable things my fellow Alabama equipment managers and I had to do before practice was to chase everyone off the field, lock the gates and check for holes in the tarps covering the fences. We had to seal that practice field off completely each day. We then posted a manager at the only remaining open entrance and his job was to keep people out. This was standard Coach Bryant procedure, he didn't want anyone around, especially most reporters. He was rude to them most of the time, providing us a good laugh every week.

The Tennessee game came around every third Saturday in October. This game caused all of the coaches to go crazy. Coach Ken Donahue was our defensive coordinator, a great man, and during UT week practice he'd run around in his flying nun hat yelling "manager, manager, I see someone in that window over yonder" pointing up at one of the two dorms a block away that had a few windows facing the practice field. One of us had to go over to the dorm, snoop around and ask the person to either close the window or keep the curtains sealed so the coaches wouldn't go completely nuts. Now, Coach Donahue had a special reason to be paranoid during UT week, that is where he went to school!

I think Coach Bryant would watch from his tower and laugh at most of this... not sure, but we all thought it was funny and he always watched everything from above in his tower.