The Aggies face a daunting task of playing No. 1 ranked Alabama in football on Saturday, and although I don’t follow college sports these days, the matchup has brought to mind a previous life of mine as an Alabama football fan and admirer of all things Dixie.

I still love Southern food — boiled peanuts, fried green tomatoes and black-eyed peas, to name just a couple of favorites — but the South no longer holds any appeal to me for a long list of reasons, humidity and chiggers chief among them.

Although I grew up in suburban Denver, as a child I identified with the South because my parents were both from Mississippi and our occasional trips back to their small hometowns were big adventures filled with exotic activities like firefly catching, boating through swamps, and hunting for Civil War relics.

This is what I also imagine Cache Valley is like for the children of couples who’ve moved away and come back to visit the folks here — mountains, farms, pioneer history, fabulous sunsets, friendly people.

“Mom, Dad, why did you ever leave this great place?”

Alabama isn’t Mississippi, but they look a lot alike both on the map and on the ground, and I was a Crimson Tide football fan because my dad attended the University of Alabama on the GI Bill following World War II, and he was a fan.

I remember excitedly sitting on the floor in front of our family’s console TV when Joe Namath led Alabama against the Texas Longhorns in the 1964 Orange Bowl, the first college bowl game ever broadcast during prime time. And again sitting next to that wood-paneled television, I felt a surge of pride when the Alabama delegation at the 1968 Democratic National Convention nominated legendary Alabama football coach Paul “Bear” Bryant for president.

I asked my dad if Bear might actually become president, and he responded no, it was just a symbolic act of ’Bama pride. The fedora-wearing coach wound up with 1 1/2 votes in the final tally that saw Minnesota’s Hubert Humphrey eventually win and take the stage to declare he was pleased as punch to accept the nomination, or some such thing.

Even as a kid caught up in football fandom and regional pride — albeit pride for a place I didn’t really belong to — the Bryant nomination struck me at some level as odd, and it planted a seed that over the years grew into bafflement for how Americans deify college football and basketball coaches.

They are by far the highest paid public employees in our country, and if they bring home victories, their names are spoken with great reverence and their storied accomplishments are sung for generations. Something’s wrong with this. Football and basketball are just games, folks, and being a coach is just a job, no more important than school teacher, first responder, snowplow driver or custodian. A good argument could be made it’s even less important.

I’ve written about this before, calling the phenomenon the “cult of coach.” You really get a strong sense of the cult’s power when you work in the news media, where sports reporters must kowtow and tiptoe if they want to stay in a powerful coach’s good graces and maintain their access to a team, which they must have to do their jobs.

One dark side of situations like this came into full focus a few years back during the sexual-abuse scandal involving assistant Penn State football coach Jerry Sandusky. Reporters and others close to the team knew what was going on long before it resulted in criminal charges. It was an open secret. But the mighty Penn State football program was untouchable.

It eventually came out that legendary Penn State Head Coach Joe Paterno also knew about the multiple accusations against Sandusky and did nothing. If the great JoePa was standing by his man, so must everybody else.

Pay attention sometime to all the comments coaches make about “doing it for the players,” “putting the players first,” then watch how quickly those same supposedly altruistic individuals jump to the next team offering them a bigger contract. Sometimes the defection happens right before the big bowl game appearance that all of the players worked so hard to earn.

Of course, what spawns and enables the cult of coach is fan fanaticism, which to me makes even less sense than worshiping the man in charge of the X’s and O’s. Ultimately, don’t you have to ask what’s really different about the guys in red vs. the guys in green or blue? In most cases, the players on the teams we ardently follow aren’t even homegrown. They’ve been recruited from far and wide to come wear our team’s colors, just as the players on the other team have.

The idea of the “home team” is really a false construct, a fantasy we create for the sake of entertainment.

Last week I got a phone call from a former Herald Journal employee who’d been a rabid, life-long Ute fan, both for basketball and football. When I mentioned his Utes, he surprisingly said he lost interest in the team a couple of years ago after moving out of state, getting a divorce and going through some other very significant life changes.

Chris was the last one you’d think this would happen to. He had season tickets to Ute football, wore red every game day, and before every basketball season he’d reread coach Rick Majerus’ autobiography.

I was happy to hear he’d freed himself from the matrix.

None of this is meant to disparage college athletes or suggest that college sports are not worthwhile, just that our society has misplaced its priorities amid the madness. The 2021 Supreme Court ruling giving athletes the ability to make some money off their stardom, instead of just being used as pawns by colleges and coaches, evens the scales a bit, but in my opinion there is still a long way to go.

Tonight’s game at Tuskaloosa’s 101,821-seat Bryant-Denny Stadium isn’t widely available on television, but I might catch some of it on radio. I’ll be rooting (mildly) for the Aggies, not the Crimson Tide, whose new cult of coach revolves around Nick Saban, recipient of a $9.8 million base salary this year.

Saban’s name, like Bear Bryant’s, has come up in conversations about the U.S. presidency. Of course, he’d have to take a massive pay cut (not to mention a big hit to his reputation) if he got the job.

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