The best ideas are often the most simple.

You’ve seen it dozens of times at a football game. A player turns an ankle, is helped off the field, then hops on a training table while 80,000 fans and a few million TV viewers gawk at him.

Sometimes, a few student trainers will hold up towels, trying to give the injured player some semblance of privacy.

That’s not how things work at the University of Alabama.

On Monday night, there will be a small tent on the sidelines, as there has been for most of the season, adorned in school colors with the words “Built by Bama” on the side. That mobile medical unit is the only one of its kind currently in use, and Jeff Allen, who oversees the sports medicine training staff for the athletic department, is a proponent.

“I think everybody recognizes it’s a difficult space to do a medical evaluation,” Allen said. “The first 10 minutes or so after an injury are critical in terms of getting an accurate diagnosis, and that type of environment presents some challenges, plus there’s a component of just medical privacy for the athlete.”

The team physician, Dr. E. Lyle Cain Jr., agrees.

“The tent is great for patient privacy and confidentiality,” he said. “Often times, the media will report an injury before we have had the chance to notify the family or come up with a treatment plan, so it is a big advantage to examine an athlete in a more private setting.”

The idea came from four engineering students at the school, and they’re hoping to see many more tents sprout up on sidelines in the future.

“We’ve definitely been pulling a thread, and it’s unraveled something we never would have been able to see in our wildest dreams a year ago,” said Jared Cassity, one of the co-inventors who graduated from Alabama in December with a mechanical engineering degree. “It almost seems too simple. You look at it and think, ‘Why didn’t we have this before?’

“We took that concept and fooled around with different ideas, and once we kind of had that base idea we realized, man, we’re really onto something. A month later we had our first PVC pipe mock-up strung with cord from Home Depot. We got more and more good feedback, learned lessons, made some design changes. Then it hit us: We’ve got something special here, and there’s nothing else like it. When it got out there on the sideline on the practice field and had it locked onto the training table and saw it go up, I think everybody was kind of speechless how well it turned out.”

Not all of the tent’s uses are medical, though.

“If you gotta use the restroom, you can go in there,” tight end O.J. Howard said. “Sometimes you might have to (go) in a bottle or something. I’ve heard of guys doing that before. I think it’s cool how it pops up and then pops back down, but most of all it keeps you from having to go all the way to locker room. You can go in there, change, put on (a different piece of equipment) if you have to. It’s very convenient.”

It the sort of thing the team hopes it never needs, but really enjoys having. And it sure beats camera shots of guys holding up towels on national television.