CECIL HURT: A renewed sense of excitement

The most anticipated event of the season for University of Alabama athletics will take place this week.

It’s not a critical basketball game in the Sweet 16. It’s not a football game, with the season long since over and the anticipation of big games having turned to dread at some point in late September.

It’s a practice.

The fact a football practice will assume more significance in the minds of Alabama fans than all the football and basketball games in the 2006-2007 time frame speaks volumes, in a number of ways. Certainly, the first practice for the Crimson Tide under new head coach Nick Saban will be historically important. So will the first A-Day, and the first game, and so on.

To date, this has been one of the most frustrating athletic years in Alabama history. That’s not to discount some great performances by softball and golf and some of the other teams. But the 2006 football season was an almost weekly chronicle of heartbreak and decline. No one knew it at the time, but the best win the football team would get all season was in the opening week against Hawaii.

After that, it was a procession of frustrating losses (and, occasionally, wins that were just about as frustrating) that eventually set into motion the events that cost Mike Shula his job. Not so much the losses, but the frustration and the sense that Shula wasn’t going to properly address the long-terms problems that Alabama faced.

To be fair, basketball did do slightly better. There were some good wins -- Xavier, Kentucky, Ole Miss -- but they were scattered between disappointments. Eventually, Alabama missed the NCAA Tournament, in a year when expectations were far higher.

Since September, there has really been only one event that has worked out in the way that Alabama fans wanted it to unfold: the hiring of Nick Saban. In the midst of all the frustration, the fact a national championship coach would leave a high-profile NFL job reaffirmed everything Tide fans want to feel about their athletics programs. It made Alabama fans feel like Alabama really matters.

Now, of course, the expectation is for Saban to put that relevance into effect on the field and, eventually, on the scoreboard. That process begins with spring practice. Hence the excitement.

It’s only a beginning, though. That’s what Alabama fans are going to have to keep in mind in the fall. Saban’s dramatic hiring has assumed such mythical proportions to some Tide fans that they expect him to field a full-strength, fire-breathing team simply by waving some sort of magic wand with a replica of the BCS Championship Trophy on its tip.

The fact is, there is some rebuilding to be done. The talent pool at Alabama isn’t dry, by any means, but there is an uneven distribution of talent. While Alabama has a few proven players on its defensive front seven -- Wallace Gilberry, Bobby Greenwood, Prince Hall -- there aren’t many.

Certainly, there are not enough for Alabama to be a physically dominant defensive front in 2007. And Saban’s history is that he prefers to build winners on defense first.

Other issues will have to be addressed as well -- some related to on-the-field areas, some involving discipline. Saban has already started that process in some areas in the off-season program. There is more work to be done, though.

There is nothing wrong with the excitement that will attend this week’s opening of spring training. Any positive energy is a good thing at Alabama at the moment. But the excitement should be based on the fact Alabama is rebuilding in pursuit of a lofty goal -- and not on the assumption that any goal has been reached yet. Saban will get there -- but it could take more than one spring practice.

Cecil Hurt is sports editor of The Tuscaloosa News. Reach him at cecil.hurt@tuscaloosanews.com or 205-722-0225.