University of Alabama Football Report for 10/12/12

Compromise is essential to building a successful life. For example, in a perfect world, Beano Cook would be bludgeoned to death with both of Ron Powlus's Heismans. Alas, we live in a compromised world, where Powlus is a punchline, Maryland fell far short of the national championship, and Cook is mundanely, mortally, and mulishly dead.

Cook will be remembered (which is in itself a marvel today) for his dogged allegiance to northeastern football superiority. That he will be remembered for such by southerners is but a curiosity. That such remembrance is akin to English folklorists speaking of dragons is all but expected. To be remembered means, at some point, peeling one's self opposite the prevailing grain.

To be successful, however, means assessing the landscape and responding accordingly. And despite the negative connotations our native audience might imbue within the word, compromise can bring great pleasure to its practitioners.

Cook lived to be a piece of rebar. Inflexible. Unglamourous. Essential for a foundation.

He, appropriately, never used ten words when one hundred would do the same job. In an imperfect world, Cook often became a perfect foil.

Would that we lived in a perfect world, tomorrow would bring a road game in Morgantown, West (fuckin') Virginny for our beloved Crimson Tide. Yet, for the sake of long-term television contracts, we find ourselves agitated over a plus-22 spread within the state of "miz-URR-ahh." Thus we sacrifice our dreams into the fevered hands of youth, and we dare anticipate a rendezvous with our antithesis: flame vs. stone.

But still, we expect the stone to roll forward. Solid, momentous, and inveterate. Not bad for an imperfect world.

Roll Tide.