Casagrande: Trump to Alabama-Georgia would bring circus back to Tuscaloosa

This is an opinion column.

Here we are again.

A two-week simmer to get everyone all hot and dizzy thinking about a fall Saturday in Tuscaloosa.

It began with the Game of the Century in 2011 and somehow got bigger.

Once again with LSU in 2019 and now, five years later, with Georgia.

The circus is coming back to town and this one’s all about … the pets?

Where the 2011 visit from LSU was perhaps the peak of college football as a sport, the next two were more about the spectacle.

And politics.

The showdown between No. 2 Georgia and No. 4 Alabama on Sept. 28 gained another subplot Monday.

Leave now if you have tickets to next Saturday night.

Kirby Smart’s Alabama angst isn’t enough after being left seeking for just three more points last December.

Do you like traffic?

Welcome to SEC play, Kalen DeBoer, as you play a super angry version of the nation’s most consistent winner spanning the current presidential administration.

Magnetometers are fun. Pat downs aren’t optional.

That’s right, presidential politics could be headed back to Bryant-Denny!

News began to leak Monday that former president and current Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is considering a campaign stop at the center of the college football universe.

That’s on top of the national television pregame shows undoubtedly setting up shop on campus and the influx of barking Georgians set to cross our eastern border.

Tuscaloosa will be a zoo.

It certainly was five years ago when the presidential motorcade rolled into the stadium for Tua vs. Borrow. In a sense, those were simpler times. The 2020 campaign hadn’t hit full speed and the multi-level fracture that was the election year was still a nightmare of the future.

That afternoon in November 2019 felt downright utopian compared to today’s climate.

It’s that level of baseline political toxicity that makes the standard college football game day such a welcome refuge from the often-depressing degradation of this discourse.

For a day, we can hate each other for based on alma maters and not ideology. Then we can laugh it off, share a tailgate drink and remember this is a game and not a battle over the very soul of this nation.

Welp.

Everyone will have their own point of view on these matters, and this isn’t an endorsement of either side. If Trump is looking for a college football stadium where the cheers will outnumber the boos, a state he won with 62% of the vote in 2020 is a safe bet.

That was certainly the case when he was introduced on the Bryant-Denny Stadium video board five years ago from his perch in an east sideline luxury box.

It will be interesting to see how any official announcement is handled since he’s not the sitting president this time around.

Two people who would cheer all of this for non-political reasons would be those two head coaches. Anything to take the pressure and attention away from the actual action on the field would certainly be a boost given the external importance that’ll be placed on this game

But there’s another major difference in this game and the 2011/2019 LSU visits.

This isn’t national title life or death for either Alabama or Georgia. A loss next Saturday won’t require acts of God, Congress or Oklahoma State to get back in the hunt for a championship.

The 12-team playoff allows the elites to play a late September game that isn’t stakes-free but not a gladiator elimination match. The winner gets the inside track to Atlanta and the first-round bye, but the loser doesn’t have to throw a temper tantrum.

So, in that sense, bring on the circus.

Gum up the roads.

Make tailgates awkward and the barking Georgians the day’s second-most divisive topic.

We’ll be fine because we’ve done it before, and this political season from the subterranean afterlife is almost over.

And if we’ve learned anything, nobody’s eliminated after one loss.

Michael Casagrande is a reporter for the Alabama Media Group. Follow him on Twitter @ByCasagrande or on Facebook.