Here’s what I can tell you after a weekend in South Beach, surrounded by fans of Notre Dame and Alabama football preparing for tonight’s B.C.S. National Championship Game: all fans are, by Webster’s definition, a bit crazy, but these two groups might be the most bonkers. On Saturday night I stood on the beach at a Notre Dame pep rally. Twenty thousand people showed up. When former Notre Dame coach Lou Holtz got onstage to close the event, everyone I could see in the crowd raised both arms in salute, extended their thumbs inward to form two L’s, and bobbed their arms up and down, as if acknowledging some deity. It felt cultish even before they partnered the genuflection with a deep moaning chant of “Lou.” Then, last night, while eating dinner at a nice restaurant in Miami’s Design District, the main course was interrupted by a woman at the next table over who stood up and asked the rest of the room what they should say when she said “Roll.” The answer, the present Alabama fans confirmed, was “Tide.” During dessert, she led the room in “Rammer Jammer Yellow Hammer,” the university’s official cheer. After a month with no football, I’m worried that some of these fans might burst with enthusiasm before tonight’s game even kicks off.

In several months spent reporting on the extremes to which fandom can extend itself, especially in the world of Alabama football, few things summed up the enthusiasm as well as the paintings of Daniel Moore. Alabama-football-themed art is a ten-million-dollar-a-year business, and Moore is the market’s undisputed don. Enter a living room, office building, or restaurant in Alabama, and chances are good that there’s a Moore on the wall. If Moore has to guess, he’s sold some two hundred and fifty thousand prints. An eight-by-ten reproduction might sell for twenty-five dollars, plus ten bucks if it’s signed. An original watercolor could go for more than twenty thousand dollars. They line the wall leading to radio host Paul Finebaum’s studio, and the Waysider, a restaurant in Tuscaloosa that serves pancakes to opposing fans in the shape of an elephant, Alabama’s mascot, is covered floor-to-ceiling in Moores. One sports reporter in Alabama, a transplant from elsewhere, told me that he discovered, with some shock, that his girlfriend had several placed prominently throughout her house.

Moore grew up wanting to play football at Alabama, but found his body better suited to art. He graduated from Alabama in 1976, with a major in graphic design and a minor in painting, and was most inspired by Chuck Close, Richard Estes, and other superrealists. In 1979, on a friend’s suggestion, he started painting football. His first canvas depicted Alabama’s goal-line stand against Penn State, which sealed that year’s national championship. A print of that painting originally sold for thirty-five dollars; today, it goes for twenty-five hundred, and it’s so hard to find, and so in demand, that one entrepreneur tore out some of the much-smaller versions of the work, as reproduced in a calendar Moore made, and resold them online at seventy-five dollars a pop. In 1992, when Alabama won the championship again, Moore sold twenty thousand prints of an image of then-head coach Gene Stallings being carried on his players’ shoulders. Sales of the paintings he made after Alabama’s 2009 championship totaled more than a million dollars.

Moore’s work isn’t fine art, but it’s not terrible, either. A decent comparison, aesthetic-wise, might be to Thomas Kinkade, if Kinkade’s color palette had been dominated by crimson. Moore uses photographs as the basis for his works, and says he strives for photorealism, with a twist. Many of his photos employ a technique he calls “photo-futurism,” by which he means “five parts realism to one part motion.” There is an intentional blurriness, to give his images a sense of movement that he likens to Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2,” though that comparison is hard to see. He records games on his D.V.R. and will occasionally paint with the screen paused on a particular play. Some of his images depict iconic moments, like “The Kick,” when Alabama beat Auburn on a last-second fifty-two-yard field goal, while others are meant simply to glorify the institution of Alabama football. Last year’s dud of a national championship, against L.S.U., had no highlights, so Moore’s painting, “Restoring The Order,” showed sixteen different Alabama players in different moments on the field, plus coach Nick Saban. Moore compares that to a Renaissance altar painting. “Not that I’m equating Alabama football to a religion or anything,” he said.

Initially, the university embraced Moore. He was given sideline passes and was allowed to borrow memorabilia from the university’s Paul W. Bryant Museum for a series of paintings on moments from Alabama lore. The university displayed his paintings on campus, and sold them in official stores. Then, in 2005, Alabama filed a suit saying that Moore had infringed on the university’s trademark by painting and selling images of its football team. Alabama’s iconically understated crimson uniforms were part of its trademark, they said. Alabama was supported in the case by the Collegiate Licensing Company, a company started by a former Alabama football player that works with more than a hundred universities to help take advantage of the four-billion-dollar college-merchandise industry. Less than one per cent of that business is done in “the art category.”

Suddenly, Moore was prevented from selling his images in the Quad, the main gameday tailgating location on campus, where the drunken decision to purchase an eight-by-ten image of Bear Bryant being carried off the field after his final victory, in front of an American flag and the word “Liberty,” might be most likely to occur. His sideline passes were revoked, and he wasn’t allowed to advertise during radio broadcasts of Crimson Tide games. (He still runs frequent ads on Paul Finebaum’s show, and other sports shows in the state. This summer, I heard a commercial on repeat for “Restoring The Order,” informing listeners that “a player signature option is also available!”) Alabama spent more than a million dollars fighting the case. One alumnus told the Times that “this lawsuit is the equivalent of the Catholic Church suing Michelangelo for painting the Sistine Chapel.”

Seven years later, the case finally appears to be settled. In 2009, a district court in Birmingham ruled in Moore’s favor. Art was protected by the First Amendment—Moore argued that his images had a specific artistic style that was, in fact, his own trademark—as long as the art could be hung on a wall: the court said slapping his images on coffee mugs and T-shirts went a step too far. Alabama appealed—as did Moore, who wanted the coffee mugs—and just this summer the U.S. Court of Appeals in Atlanta confirmed the original ruling, though it recommended further study on the coffee-mug issue.

Moore’s most famous painting, fittingly enough, involves the team that Alabama is facing in the championship game tonight. “The Sack” sits near the entrance to the Bryant Museum on campus in Tuscaloosa, almost life-sized, and shows Alabama linebacker Cornelius Bennett sacking Notre Dame quarterback Steve Beuerlein, who owns a copy of the painting, during Alabama’s 1986 win over the Irish. That was the last time Alabama beat the Irish—the only time, in fact. As of 2005, the original painting was worth an estimated two hundred and fifty thousand dollars.

Moore is not in Miami for the game. “I didn’t want to spend that kind of money,” he told me, from his home outside Alabama. He was putting the finishing touches on a painting from this season, commemorating Alabama’s come-from-behind win against L.S.U., a sketch of which could set you back twenty-five hundred dollars. He hasn’t decided what he will paint should Alabama win tonight, though he’s certainly rooting for the Tide, despite his legal battle: losses don’t sell. His image won’t come out for several months, though he’ll put preliminary sketches online to whet appetites. He’s got big expectations for possible sales. “This is the greatest and the biggest game that I’ve ever known in my lifetime,” Moore said. He expects a lopsided Alabama win, and because he doesn’t like doing montage, he’s mostly rooting for some iconic moment—an interception, a catch, a particularly splashy Gatorade dump—that could hold up an entire painting. Whatever the subject, it’s a reasonable bet that the woman yelling “Roll Tide” over her espresso will be a buyer.

Photograph by Lauren Lancaster.