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Alabama football fans reliving rare, miserable losses on Twitter: ‘It’s therapeutic’

It doesn’t always go well for Alabama football fans. On rare occasions, the Crimson Tide lose games. (Ben Flanagan / AL.com)

Why re-live an Alabama football loss? They happen so rarely, there mere thought of them in the vivid detail fans all remember them must hurt so badly.

Paul T. Graham and his fellow Crimson Tide fan friends have found the opposite is true through open, honest and downright hilarious conversations looking back on the 19 losses of the Nick Saban era since the 2008 season during the “19 Days of Misery” Twitter Spaces series.

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Born in Atmore, Graham has lived in Birmingham, where he works as an accountant, since 1991. He attended the University of Alabama, but first recollections of Crimson Tide football came in the late 1970s. He is brother to John Graham, who runs the Alabama Pro Updates Twitter account.

Graham had the idea in 2021, thinking it would be fun considering the run Alabama has enjoyed during the Saban era. He could focus on the 176 wins, but you’d have to sort through all the “cupcake” games, which don’t generate as much engagement. With the advent of Twitter Spaces, he saw potential to launch the series with friends on the app, including Tide super-fan Hunter Johnson. They experimented with the new online format late in the 2021 football season and then throughout the entirety of the basketball and baseball seasons (to drum up more interest in those programs), where fans across “Gump Twitter” gathered in an orderly fashion to celebrate, vent, shoot the breeze and more for typically two hours per session.

“You can still control the crowd, the flow and the content,” Graham said about using Twitter Spaces for the discussions. “I just like it better than podcast mode where it’s a little more stale. People responded to it really well.”

To fill the void of Bama football during a quiet off-season, Graham launched “19 Days of Misery,” wherein fans re-live the 19 losses between 2008 and 2021, which will culminate with the latest national championship loss to Georgia the Wednesday before the 2022 season begins. Each speaker shares where they were on the given day and how their perspective might differ from other fans in the Space, as they go quarter by quarter rehashing each loss including the hows and whys of what went wrong, and of course some woulda-coulda-shoulda sprinkled in.

So why put yourself through misery again, voluntarily? Graham said, if anything, looking back at the rare dark periods of the Saban era only highlight the unique dominance of the current run, as he explains below. (Note: The first four episodes are not currently available, but you can hear every episode since the fifth, and Graham said they will likely release the series as a podcast).

So we took the bait and asked Graham about how Alabama fans process losing, which losses should have never even happened and how Twitter Spaces gave him and his friends a place to conquer these demons.

READ: Alabama football’s rare heartbreaking losses: Which hurt the most?

What’s the most painful Bama loss in your lifetime?

Paul T. Graham: Probably for me, when I was 12-years-old, the 1982 Iron Bowl. Because if you think about that, we had not lost to them since 1972, and I was 2-years-old, so I had no recollection of that whatsoever. I grew up in a South Alabama town, a lot of Auburn fans there. For my entire life, that game was a non-event. We dropped that game, and you’ve got to show up at school on Monday having lost to these people that you’ve been going to school with since fifth or sixth grade. That one, probably, at that time would have been it.

What’s the most painful Saban era loss?

In my older more adult life, if you really get down to these 19, the toughest for me has still got to be that 2016 Clemson national title game. Because of all these teams of that era, that was probably still my favorite. Just the way they played defense, the swagger of the defensive guys. You had QB controversy going into the season. This young freshman comes in and blows the doors off of everybody else. You’ve got Lane Kiffin dialing up things for him throughout the year. And just the fact that we got out of that season without a national championship, probably because of a couple of a key injuries — the Eddie Jackson loss, Scarborough breaking his leg in the third quarter. That one, in my adult life, probably hurts the most.

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Alabama football fans sad
It doesn’t always go well for Alabama football fans. On rare occasions, the Crimson Tide lose games. (Ben Flanagan / AL.com)

We can play woulda-coulda-shoulda and what if forever, but you get into some dodgy butterfly effect territory. Saban even said about the most recent Georgia loss, he isn’t sure the outcome would have been different if Alabama was healthy. But, looking back, what is one loss you think really should have been a win for one reason or another?

I could probably narrow down two. The obvious one is the Kick Six game, and the fact that we never could extend beyond a one-score lead in the fourth quarter. If you go back and watch that game, almost the entirety of that fourth quarter was played between midfield and at the Auburn 10-yardline. We were parked in their territory that whole fourth quarter. The fact that we didn’t get a fourth down, we missed a field goal, we had a false start on just the slightest of moves. There were so many things about that game that largely go back to those field goals, you really feel like if you could have just gone up two scores in that one, you put Auburn in a bad position, and you probably win it.

The one that comes to mind a little less is the Ole Miss game in 2015. It was the most bizarre set of occurrences in that game. We turned the ball over five times. We went for fourth downs and didn’t get them on two occasions. They had no turnovers all night, and we’re still in the game. Even at the end of that game, we got the ball back with two minutes left. Broke a nice long run by Jake Coker, who emerged as our quarterback that night. Converting a third down here or there, Ole Miss not throwing a ball off the back of our defensive back that deflects and results in a touchdown pass. That one probably to me is a “coulda-shoulda.” If you look at the 19 [losses], there was the one big blowout to Clemson. The Georgia game was by 15, but think of how that flipped on a pick-6 just at the end. You’ve got a couple early on — the Oklahoma and Utah games that technically didn’t matter. You can make a case for just about every other one of these, there’s a good coulda-shoulda won that comes down to a play or two, or a key turnover, or a missed field goal, or an untimely fake field goal call. That’s the way I’ve looked at them. The ones that really mattered that looked like we were truly engaged, there’s probably seven or eight of those are heavily woulda-coulda.

READ: Which Iron Bowl loss is most painful for Alabama fans?

Why is it important to process the 19 losses this way, with a conversation among Gump Twitter?

We have a 24-hour rule on wins, we’ve always heard that. I think in anything, and I even think about this from playing basketball or baseball, anything in high school. To this day, the things you remember most are the losses. You remember the failures a lot more. You dwell on them a lot more. The theme was 24 hours to celebrate wins, obsess about the losses for a lifetime. I think we naturally do that. It’s part of being Alabama. Having grown up in the ‘70s, the ‘77 loss to Nebraska can still remember, the ‘78 loss to Southern Cal at Legion Field, 1980 the Notre Dame loss at Legion Field. I couldn’t tell you how we beat LSU any of those years or did we beat Mississippi State or what the score was. But there are still plays to this day 40-something years ago to this day that I can remember.

So part of this was to hopefully entertain people, give them something to do for a few hours football-related. It’s a very FOG-gy [”FOG” means “football-only Gump”] thing for us to do, guys like us that are supporters of the baseball and basketball programs. I felt like it was a good way to maybe help people understand them a little bit, because there tend to be narratives about some of these losses. When you go back and re-watch them and sometimes you understand a little better exactly what happened and why things changed after that to make a season finish on a high note.

So while you dwell on the losses, you see how good our coaching staffs have been from learning from them or correcting from them. And whether that’s game by game, in season, or scrapping the entire offense, going to a more mobile quarterback or hiring Lane Kiffin. It’s important to help people understand that sometimes the only way to correct is to have a disaster and learn from a loss. And people have told me it’s therapeutic. You get a lot of people on there ranting and are upset about things. And towards the end, I’ll read off the stat of the week, whether it was a game where we were particularly bad kicking or got out-rushed…I’m reading these numbers and I can just hear people groaning in the background. But it’s very therapeutic. They keep coming back, so I guess it’s working.

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Alabama football fans sad
It doesn’t always go well for Alabama football fans. On rare occasions, the Crimson Tide lose games. (Ben Flanagan / AL.com)

You’ve built a great group of regular and featured guests to reluctantly walk us down this miserable memory lane. What has that community of Bammer commiseration meant to you these last few weeks?

It’s been a lot of fun. It’s a lot of work. I have a high level of appreciation, I had never done podcasting or radio or media. I love to write, but most of it is embedded in work I do or something. It felt like a project, like a big research paper. I’m an empty-nester. My kids are all off doing their thing now, so it’s not like every night I get home I have to go to the park and watch a game. I haven’t swung a golf club in years. This became almost an obsession. I said we’re going to do 20 for these. We’re going to do a prologue, build up from the end of the Bryant era to what led to Coach Saban arriving. We skimmed the 2007 season because we didn’t want to talk about six losses in one year. So we started with what I call the proper Saban era, the ‘08 season. What I found is you’ve got to really be prepared. If you’re going to do these and do them right in an organized manner, you’ve got to re-watch the games. It’s like being back in high school, taking notes in chemistry class. I’ve usually got five or six pages of very sloppily handwritten notes on these games. You can dive into them and pile it up. You owe it to the people who are going to be on and listening, that you did the research and that you at least taught them something about the game or reminded them of something they didn’t know. Maybe make them feel a little better about the game.

It’s been a fun group. A lot of the same folks chime in. I try to get them to join, and they finally will. Don’t feel like you have to be a polished professional doing this. Just jump in, give your opinions, and I’ll steer it in a direction I want it to go. The other thing we try to do is be funny. There’s a sense of misery, but there’s a lot of fun in these. You’re poking fun at the greatest coach of all time for having terribly drawn-up terrible fake field goal plays or for never having a kicker who could get a 33-yard field goal through the uprights in a key situation. There’s a little bit of levity even though it’s a little absurd. It’s become you and three of your buddies just sitting at a bar having a drink or two and talking for a couple of hours after work.

We recently learned Nick Saban shed some tears after the Kick Six. Have you ever cried during or after an Alabama game, either sad or happy tears?

I can’t think of a happy tears situation. One I might can recall was being in school and the ‘89 season when we’re playing Penn State up in Happy Valley. We’re up 19-17 in the fourth quarter. Penn State’s got the ball. They’re driving down. I think Blair Thomas is their running back. They’re down at the 1 yard-line. It’s the field goal, called the “Desperation block.” We get a hand up and block this 18-yard field goal. You can remember the jubilation. We were at a pre-formal party at the Ivory Tusk, and we all just spilled out into the street. That might be the closest I’ve come to crying over a win.

None of these games have I cried over a loss. I’m not that big a Gump. But I would be very surprised if I hadn’t shed some tears over that 1982 Iron Bowl. The Mississippi State game in 1980 that ended a 28-game winning streak. That one was particularly hard to stomach. We had not lost since the USC game in the 1978 season. That was maybe the second or third game of the year. We ran the table in 1979, and then we lose 6-3 at Starkville. That one hurt just because I was so young and I didn’t know how to act. One thing I point out to people is how many days we would go between losses in this era. The South Carolina game in 2010, we had not lost in 645 days. We had another one that went 679 games. The thing people have to appreciate as Alabama fans is we act the way we do when we lose because we forgot how it feels. There’s such an interval between these games, on average, these 19 games have been spread apart 265 days, so it’s very gratifying from that standpoint.

Why should Alabama fans want to listen to this? Why re-live losses? What good can come of this?

I think what’s good about it is, in the grand scheme of things, if you went back and listened to this series from the beginning, I think you get a greater appreciation for just how magical this run has been. We’re 176-19 in this era. That’s a 90.3 percent winning clip. We’ve won eight SEC championships. We’ve won six national championships.

There have been years in this era where it’s been much harder to win the SEC than it has to win the national championship, and I don’t think we give adequate appreciation to that. When you look at the 14 years before that, to Saban’s first back to 1994, we went 104-68. That’s a 60 percent winning percentage. We won one SEC championship. And if you go all the way back to Bryant’s last year, only won 72 percent of our games. I think all time, Alabama is like 75-76 percent overall winning percentage. From a comparability standpoint, no one’s really touched that. The closest I could find is Florida State from ‘87 to 2000, they go 152-19-1, and they won two national championships. Miami’s best run from ‘83 to ‘96 was an 85.1 percent clip, they won four national championships. That’s college football history right there.

It’s good to point out the losses, what they meant to he people that actually beat us, what it took for someone to beat us. Incredible things had to happen in these other teams’ favors. We had to do things to ourselves to make it happen. The teams that have beaten us aggregate record has been 225-37. So it’s not like we’re losing to the bottom of our schedule. These are legitimately good teams that are beating us. I think the reason people ought to listen is just to understand how remarkable that we’ve lost even 19 games. You could probably make a case we should have won all but eight or 10 of them, and what that would have meant had we done that. It also helps them understand we’ve been very fortunate in the other that we pulled out that we shouldn’t have won. I could pick a handful of them. The narrative that takes shape in some of these games from people who were there who were mad about it or didn’t watch the TV broadcast, when you go back and watch it, you understand them better, you understand the teams better. You see how remarkably they were able to respond in most cases whether it was that season or in general to keep this run going. And the run’s not over. We’re coming up on ‘22. I dare say, falling off the cliff this year is highly unlikely, and it doesn’t look like it’s going to end anytime soon.

The “19 Days of Misery” Twitter Space will resume with the 2019 Auburn game discussion Wednesday, Aug. 24 at 8 p.m. The next episode (Sunday, 8 p.m.) will cover Texas A&M 2021, followed by the final episode (Wednesday, Aug. 31, 8 p.m.) covering the Georgia loss in the College Football Playoff. Follow the series.