How this dynasty all began is difficult to remember for Alabama’s starting running back.
Brian Robinson is from Tuscaloosa and grew up a fan of the Crimson Tide. He can’t recall a time when Alabama football wasn’t this generational college football monolith that now towers over the sport like some enormous mountaintop in the clouds.
The mountain has always been there, creating its own weather, watching the forest grow and die and then grow again anew, welcoming, off in the distance, migrating herds from Texas and a lonesome wagon train from Oklahoma.
For Robinson and his peers, this mountain of success at Alabama are their only memories, and the deity of domination is so revered that just having a chance to play there is reward enough. So it was with Robinson, who was once the No.7-rated high school running back in the entire country, but is now going on five seasons without being the starter for Alabama.
Finally, this is his time to be the thunder that barrels down the mountain.
This is Alabama football in the year after Nick Saban set the mark for all-time national championships by a college football coach. He has seven, and six at Alabama since 2009.
What now?
What next?
What peak does Saban have left to conquer?
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Those are the wrong questions entirely. Saban is the mountain, and Alabama can’t win a national championship every year, but its constant presence atop the sport for longer than college-aged fans can remember has put everything around it in motion.
In the era of college football’s transfer portal, Alabama has future NFL running backs who wait five years for their turn. A program that started this forever-ago run with angry offenses built around a ground attack now boasts multiple quarterbacks in the NFL, including the two most recent starters selected in the first rounds of the most recent NFL drafts.
Tua Tagovailoa is preparing for his second season with the Miami Dolphins, Mac Jones is the heir apparent to Tom Brady for the New England Patriots and now Bryce Young, a cerebral talent from Southern California, is taking over in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.
In a time of change for the sport, with shifting sands and angry seas, the mountain is the mountain.
Saban had COVID-19 the week of the Iron Bowl in 2020, and he was using that down time to land five-star recruits over the phone the night before Thanksgiving. Texas couldn’t hire Saban away from Alabama, so Texas is joining the SEC.
Saban called his national champions in 2020 his “ultimate team” because they came together during adversity and persevered through a season like college football had never seen. Winning took more than preparation in the weight room and a loaded depth chart. It also required players staying out of quarantine and isolating themselves from everyone else on campus.
With a vaccine for COVID-19 now available, Alabama’s team for the 2021 season is almost 100 percent vaccinated and the preseason No.1 in both polls. There are three Heisman Trophy finalists to replace on offense, but, in a season of college football that will feature elite offenses across the league, Alabama’s defense, on paper, should be better than it has been in four years.
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This is the season of the so-called “super seniors,” and Robinson, the running back from Hillcrest High in Tuscaloosa, is one of those players who took advantage of the NCAA’s decision in 2020 to grant everyone participating in collegiate athletics during the first wave of the pandemic an extra year of eligibility. A twice-over senior for the Crimson Tide, Robinson returned to school for one more year so he could finally start for his hometown team.
These are the things that make college football special, and always have, and as Alabama begins a new season that feels like a bridge to major changes for the sport, it’s worth stopping to appreciate Robinson’s life in full. He was in fifth grade when Alabama clobbered Texas in the BCS national championship of the 2009 season.
That was his first memory of Alabama football.
The mountain was always there to climb.
Joseph Goodman is a columnist for the Alabama Media Group. He’s on Twitter @JoeGoodmanJr. His first book, “We Want Bama: A Season of Hope and the Making of Nick Saban’s ‘Ultimate Team’,” debuts in November.
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