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Alabama Fans Are Deadly Serious About Football
A wheeled casket gives new meaning to the war cry, “Roll Tide!”
Alabama football fans call their team’s head coach Nick Saban “St. Nick,” as though he’d already died and been canonized. They make pilgrimages to a 9-foot-tall bronze statue him on the campus Tuscaloosa. They believe he earns his $9.7 million a year salary by performing miracles like that 2021 Iron Bowl victory in quadruple overtime.
UCLA, Texas A&M, and the University of Virginia have all pulled out of 2021 bowl games because of Covid-19 protocols. But Alabama, with its immortality established in the days of the legendary head coach Paul “Bear” Bryant, plays University of Cincinnati today in the Cotton Bowl.
And then there’s this: A wheeled casket that gives new meaning to the Crimson Tide’s war cry, “Roll Tide!”
Custom caskets or burials are nothing new — just look at what the ancient Egyptians did for King Tut — but in an age of personal branding, they’re gaining in popularity.
Funeral director Kurt Soffe told the Wall Street Journal that as many as 90% of caskets sold at his Jenkins-Soffe funeral home in South Jordan, Utah, have custom details. Boomers, he said, “they like things their way.”
