CECIL HURT: It’s been an off-year for Tide sports

The 2006-07 NCAA sports season isn’t quite over yet. Technically, the fat lady doesn’t sing the final aria until the end of the College World Series, which will determine the final NCAA champion of the year. But with the school year at the University of Alabama coming to a symbolic close with Saturday’s graduation ceremonies, it’s at least time for a preview of what that swan song for the season will sound like -- and it isn’t a pretty tune.

Even with hope remaining in some of Alabama’s more successful spring sports -- softball, the men’s and women’s golf teams and the men’s tennis team, with its NCAA upset of Duke on Saturday -- it’s still been a dismal year for Alabama. The Crimson Tide will finish the season without winning a single Southeastern Conference championship in any sport. It didn’t win the Western Division in any sport (it was the highest-finishing division team in golf, but that sport doesn’t compete by division).

That’s 20 SEC championship opportunities, if you count all the permutations of track (indoor, outdoor and cross country) and no hardware for the year. Not every sport has been entirely disappointing. The rapidly-improving men’s and women’s golfers both finished second in the SEC, and the Crimson Tide took third place in men’s cross country and volleyball.

The men’s tennis team finished in a four-way tie for third place and is playing well in the NCAA Tournament. Softball was ranked No. 1 in the nation at one point and may yet prove capable of winning the Women’s College World Series, but a bumpy final week of the season left the Crimson Tide in third place in league standings.

Those were some of the high points in conference competition. Every other Tide team finished in the middle of the pack in SEC competition, or worse. That included some high-profile sports like gymnastics, baseball and men’s basketball that didn’t perform up to expectations, sports whose coaches have track records of success but seemed to be in a downward trough or, in the vernacular of sports, an “off-year." Those things do happen. Sustained excellence in a highly competitive league isn’t easy (although it isn’t impossible, either, as Auburn’s 11 straight men’s SEC swimming titles show).

Still, it takes a lot of sugar to coat the overall year. Perhaps the best measure is the national NACDA Cup standings. The NACDA Cup (which used to be called the Sears Cup until the sponsorship deal fell through a few years ago) measures the overall national success of a school’s athletic programs.

It’s easy for SEC fans to find fault with a calculation that considers fencing and football as equally important. The overall national award is almost always going to go to schools like Stanford or North Carolina that sponsor more sports (and hence win more championships) than most SEC schools.

On the other hand, if one takes the broad view of the NACDA Cup, it can be an interesting measure of performance.

Right now, Alabama is 71st nationally in those standings. Among the teams that rank just ahead of the Crimson Tide are such athletic factories as New Hampshire, Providence, Princeton, New Mexico and Hawaii. Now, Alabama does have some sports remaining (again, softball and golf) where it can count on scoring points. Even if those teams perform well, it’s hard to see Alabama jumping much higher than 50th.

Gymnastics scored some national points, but not as many as usual. So did men’s swimming. But neither was close to winning a title, and no other sport so far has even been realistically in the picture.

It probably isn’t fair to expect Alabama to win the NACDA Cup against schools who sponsor more sports. But it is fair to expect better than 71st (or even 50th), when you look at where other SEC schools rank. Overall, Alabama is 10th among SEC member institutions right now, and even with a strong close, it might be hard to catch any of the SEC brethren, since most of them have good spring sports teams as well.

For comparison purposes, consider that six SEC schools rank in the Top 25. Florida, with its titles in football and men’s basketball (an achievement that most sports fans consider the true “all-sports" sweep), is No. 6 overall. Tennessee is No. 11 and is a legitimate national contender in softball and golf. Auburn, powered by its mighty swim teams, is No. 18.

Every team in the SEC East – yes, Vanderbilt, too – currently is ahead of Alabama.

The only SEC teams that the Tide currently outranks are Ole Miss and Mississippi State.

Despite that litany of unpleasant numbers, this isn’t a blanket condemnation. It’s just a suggestion that, with things at the current pass, perhaps it is now time to expect repairs to begin.

That’s because the football program, for the first time in what seems like a decade, is in sound and stable hands, free of NCAA turmoil. That doesn’t mean that Nick Saban has been handed the keys to a fully functioning Ferrari of a football program. He’s got plenty of work to do, from rebuilding the engine to polishing the chrome, so to speak. But, given the resources, he can do it without constant hand-holding from the administration.

That’s one part of the value of football success. When football is sputtering, it has to be the top priority. Economically, football drives everything else. At Alabama (and other traditional football powers), it seems to do the same thing from an emotional standpoint. If one thing has been more encouraging than any other aspect of Alabama athletics this spring, it has been the renewed sense of optimism and enthusiasm.

That shouldn’t be limited to football, though. Yes, football had to be fixed – and to Mal Moore’s credit, it looks like it has been fixed. But it’s important to show that the commitment to excellence isn’t just limited to one sport, that it isn’t just a catchy name on a spring football award.

Renewed football success should mean renewed success across the board (that is what happened in the late 1970’s, a golden age for football and for all-sports excellence at UA.) The competition is stiff in the SEC – but Alabama needs to show that it intends to compete fervently in everything, not just football.

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