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The University of Alabama is once more the possessor of the national college football championship, and in the Heart of Dixie the return of that trophy to Tuscaloosa is comparable to the return of the Ark of the Covenant to the territory of Israel after its capture by the Philistines.

And here I am slipping into the sloppy thinking typical of snooty outsiders who think Alabama is a one-dimensional state, that one dimension being football.

It's an easy attitude to acquire. Alabama is a small Southern state still cherishing its antebellum traditions, still gleaming with redneck brass, only recently awakening to the heroism its black citizens displayed during the civil rights struggle.

It has no world-class cities (Birmingham has long since retreated into the shadow of Atlanta; metropolitan Charlotte is larger and is growing twice as fast; metro Raleigh is breathing down its neck and will soon pass it.) Mobile still asserts its claim to being the birthplace of Mardi Gras in North America, but New Orleans gets all the respect. Alabama has produced no presidents. When people think of famous Alabamians they think of Bear Bryant and George Wallace, usually in that order.

Alabama has no major league sports teams, though its NASCAR track at Talladega is a magnet for the major leaguers of stock car racing.

Educated Alabamians say "Thank God for Mississippi," and "Why can't we be more like North Carolina?" There's a strong strain of admiration for the Tar Heel state down there, in everything except football.

When it comes to college football, Alabama envies no one. It regularly produces national powers at the University of Alabama and its sister (and fierce rival), Auburn University. It's ironic that the Texas Longhorns, representing a state several times the size and population of Alabama and with a history enriched by cattle, oil, the Alamo and tall tales, went into the national championship game as the underdog against 'Bama.

I spent the better part of a decade roaming the backroads of Alabama and the streets of her cities, and I can tell you that the state is more than the Crimson Tide -- awesome as that athletic pachyderm may be.

A few miles up I-59 from Bryant-Denny Stadium, they make Mercedes-Benzes (Mebane was a dropout in the race for that plant). Just off I-20 to the east of Birmingham they make Hondas. On the outskirts of Montgomery is a big Hyundai plant. Alabama is producing the cars that threw Detroit for a huge loss.

Up in Huntsville, the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center developed the rockets that propelled America into outer space. Nor is technology a recent arrival in Alabama. During the War Between the States, Mobile was a center of submarine and mine development.

Neither Auburn nor Alabama has reached the elite academic status of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill or the critical mass of the Research Triangle. Alabama has no private colleges to rival Duke or Wake Forest. But neither UA nor AU is a diploma mill, as the six astronauts who graduated from Auburn can attest. Regina Benjamin, just sworn in as surgeon general of the United States, is an Alabama native and a graduate of the highly regarded medical school at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. Supreme Court Justice Hugo Black, one of the most influential jurists of the 20th century, was a product of the University of Alabama law school.

There's nothing second-string about Alabama's intellectual heritage. Helen Keller, author, lecturer and heroine of the play and movie, "The Miracle Worker," was born in Tuscumbia. Harper Lee, Pulitzer-winning author of "To Kill a Mockingbird," grew up in the small town of Monroeville as a neighbor and friend of Truman Capote, author of "Breakfast at Tiffany's," "In Cold Blood" and other acclaimed works. F. Scott Fitzgerald and H. L. Mencken both found wives in Alabama's literary community.

In the world of entertainment, Alabama produced Hank Williams, who became a giant of country music before his death at 29. Tallulah Bankhead and Nat King Cole both sprang from Alabama soil. Johnny Mack Brown was a star of the Crimson Tide's Rose Bowl-winning team before he became a cowboy hero to a generation of small boys.

For scholars, try Edward Osborne Wilson, a native of Birmingham who took his undergraduate and master's degrees from the University of Alabama and his doctorate from Harvard. In 1995, Time magazine named him one of the 25 most influential men in America. He is one of only two people to win both the Pulitzer Prize for literature (twice) and the National Medal of Science. The Royal Swedish Academy of Science couldn't award him a Nobel prize, because the Nobels don't cover the areas of his expertise; so it awarded him the Crafoord Prize for his work in ecology.

It ain't the Heisman (John Heisman, for whom the award was named, coached five years at Auburn and the state of Alabama has produced three Heisman winners), but it ain't bad for somebody who sprang from a small Southern state. Roll Tide!

Write to Gene Owens at 315 Lakeforest Circle, Anderson SC 29625. E-mail: Swampscum2@aol.com