re: OT: Phillip Marshall died today

Auburn has a bigger alumni base in the Atlanta region than north Alabama. Scabs could’ve easily made a bigger career if he was an Auburn homer living over in the ATL. Of course, Auburn got a lot of bandwagon fans during the Tuberville era.

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That doesn’t seem like a good business model in my opinion. Why piss off your biggest target audience

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Because auburn wants to be the biggest target audience one day. Sadly they have been very successful over the past 5 decades. auburn used to be a joke and the state was divided about 80-20. Now the state is more like 60-40. You do that by buying all the media and making Alabama look, very subtly, as bad as possible.

You are right that Gene Bartow was a good man, one of the few decent men in college basketball. But he destroyed the latter part of his career with his misplaced and unfortunate hatred of Alabama. This caused him to “take his eye off the ball” and they disintegrated into irrelevance. He was hoisted on his own petard.

This was exacerbated by his selfish nepotism which insured they would remain mired in a mediocrity from which they’ve never emerged.

It’s hard to maintain an endeavor energized primarily by hatred.

Alabama has consistently maintained an advantage of 2 to 2 1/2 to 1 over AU in instate fans. It may be the survey you are talking about but it was from another major city in the state during the Shula years when Alabama fandom would been at its least fervent and AU would have been at fever pitch.

Yes, you’re correct. Mike Anderson.

Now the state is more like 70-30. But you are right that AU is working ever vigilantly to eat into the lead with only minimal success thus far. I don’t know if Alabama is complacent, lazy, naive, stupid or are gentlemen, but they seem to do nothing.

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You do that by buying all of the media and making Alabama look, very subtly, as bad as possible.

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Very, very astute observation. (I reject and even despise many of your comments. This doesn’t change that, but I guess I will have to pay closer attention to what you say in the future because you nailed it with that comment. Thanks.)

Gene should never have written that letter to the NCAA in 1993 mentioning Coach Bryant. He also should have kept UAB basketball only.

Mike Anderson had them going pretty well but they were never going to keep him.

Yeah I lost track of the post you were responding to, I see it now.