Outsider.

It is hard to remember, in the current context of Alabama football, just how much that idea was debated for the better part of 20 years. For much of the post-Paul Bryant era, there was a debate - not highbrow enough to be called philosophical, but fundamental - about which coaches and athletic administrators had the right ties to Bryant. Occasionally, there was even a debate over whether those ties mattered.

At times, it was hard to tell who fit into which category without a scorecard. The simple math is that, of the eight coaches hired since Bryant retired, only three actually played at Alabama and five did not.

The three who did were Ray Perkins, Mike DuBose and Mike Shula. Bill Curry did not. Neither did Gene Stallings, Dennis Franchione, Mike Price or Nick Saban. But, because he played for Bryant at Texas A&M and served a lengthy stint as an assistant under Bryant at Alabama, Stallings is generally placed more firmly in the Bryant lineage than any other coach in the group.

It gets even more confusing when you look at athletic administrators. Steve Sloan, a quarterback under Bryant and, according to all observers, one who shared a close relationship with his college coach, didn't get much benefit of the doubt.

In fact, he was often treated as an outsider, because he served during the years when Bill Curry was coaching. The reverse phenomenon is true now. Mal Moore's ties to Bryant as player and assistant coach run so deep that he is free to hire any coach he wants, regardless.

In the current light, some of that seems old-fashioned. With Saban, what Alabama has done is hire the best coach available, give him room to do his thing and then reaped the results. In other words, it has done the same thing it did when Bryant - who just happened to be an alumnus - was hired.

But there was a time when it mattered a lot, which bring us to Bill Curry.

Curry was the only coach who was brought to Alabama, not just from the outside, but specifically, in some ways, because he was "outside." He was almost marketed that way from the beginning. In the headlines of The Tuscaloosa News on the day he was hired, Curry was hailed as an "academic-oriented choice." It wasn't that Curry was some sort of sideline-stalking professor. He was a football coach. But the issue was that, with Bryant gone and the combative Perkins out of the way, UA President Joab Thomas wanted to bring the football program more into line with the university as a whole. There are some good reasons for that, but the problem was that Curry was suddenly sold as an iconoclast. For a lot of people, the notion was that Curry was brought in to diminish football in some way.

And once that perception took hold, it was impossible to shake.

There was a persistent negativity in the Curry years. Winning can overcome that, but because he could never beat Auburn, Curry carried the brunt of that burden into every offseason.

A great deal can be said about Curry the football coach. I thought, generally speaking, that he was as good as his coordinators, to whom he gave free rein, and his talent level. When he had a Homer Smith coaching offense, he had a good offense. When he had Don Lindsey coaching defense, there were some inconsistencies. When he didn't have Alabama-level talent, as at Kentucky, he struggled.

But it was off the field that mattered. It wasn't entirely that Curry was "a Georgia Tech man." That may have mattered to some old-line fans, but the real issue was that he was presented as an agent of change to a group of fans, and administrators, who wanted no change in Alabama football.

Ultimately, Curry capitulated in a fight that I am not sure he ever really wanted. There were ramifications that were both good - a national championship in 1992 - and bad - decades of NCAA trouble that stemmed, among many other causes, from an outside perception that the football program was bigger than the university.

In some ways, Bill Curry didn't want to be an outsider. I've always thought he respected Alabama football tradition - even if he never was, or was never allowed to be, really a part of it.

Reach Cecil Hurt at cecil.hurt@tuscaloosanews.com or at 205-722-0225.