The conversation made “NBC Nightly News.” Then the police called. Homeland Security got involved. From February into March and most of April, the incident dominated Finebaum’s airwaves.

Updyke, 62 when he first called Finebaum’s show, phoned Finebaum and his producers regularly from jail, complaining about his conditions. He wanted Finebaum to recommend a lawyer. Finebaum began to feel sorry for him. In one conversation, Finebaum said, Updyke told him “he really didn’t mean to do it,” that he had intended the whole thing as a prank. Finebaum said he gasped at the confession.

Updyke pleaded guilty to one count of unlawful damage of an animal or crop facility, but before his release last June, Finebaum secured a jailhouse sit-down. Finebaum visited on a rainy Sunday morning early that month, and he stopped on the drive over at a bookstore to buy two preseason college football magazines with Alabama quarterback A J McCarron on the cover.

Finebaum declined to divulge the contents of their conversation. He is working on a book about his time in the SEC and his career in football, and that is how he secured the interview in the first place. But he did say that Updyke fixated on the magazines. He also found Updyke to be “a fairly normal guy,” not the extremist fan he had been painted as.

Finebaum was asked if that spoke to the culture of football, especially in the South, especially when it came to the rivalry between Auburn and Alabama. He noted that many Alabama fans felt the allegations that Auburn quarterback Cam Newton was shopped to various universities after a stint in junior college tainted the Tigers’ national championship after the 2010 season. He pointed out the trip Updyke took to New Orleans and how many fellow Alabama fans wanted pictures with him.

“It’s fashionable now to come down on Updyke, to treat him as an outcast,” Finebaum said. “But in Alabama it was not that shocking. There were vigils and Facebook pages and all the things that we get used to. But if you just drove down the road, any county in the state, and pulled into a Cracker Barrel, I don’t think Updyke would be considered that much of an outlier.

“He just had too much ’Bama in him.”

The Rescue Effort

Gary Keever tried to save the oaks.

Like most at Auburn, he cannot pinpoint exactly when the rolling tradition started, perhaps in the 1960s or the early ’70s, when students began to loft rolls of toilet paper into trees. Keever cannot say for sure, but as a horticulturist and university professor since 1982, he understood what the tradition meant.