Touchdown! Few words in the English language have such a profound impact on a certain group of people. Whether your team comes from Starkville, Tuscaloosa, Auburn or Baton Rouge, few things that quicken the pulse more than hearing your team’s fight song after an impressive 15-play, 85-yard touchdown drive to finish off a rival late in the fourth quarter. On the other side of the balance, few levels of depression that can equal watching your team be defeated on a Saturday afternoon. But win, lose or draw, college football is a staple of life in the South.
As a testament to the excitement (and perhaps blood-alcohol) level of football fanatics, people will fight to the point of being thrown in jail in order to protect the good name of their football team. Is this healthy? Probably not, but it is just the way things are on any given Saturday afternoon in any given Southeastern Conference stadium. Yes, they do play football up north; and yes, they do take football seriously up North, but I think fans above the Mason-Dixon line have a far better understanding of the word sanity.
That being said, please understand that I am not harping on all football fans in the SEC. All schools have their good and bad fans, but it just seems that fans down here take both extremes to the next level.
I saw an illustration of this concept in Auburn, Ala., a few years ago. Wearing crimson and white to Auburn for the Iron Bowl can be a life-threatening proposition. In 1999, I made the trek down to Auburn to watch the game. Within five minutes of arriving, cordial Auburn fans invited me into their RV and treated me to the best barbecued ribs I’ve ever tasted. Then, a far less friendly (and less sober) welcoming committee of Tiger fans chased me around in a pickup truck hurling beer bottles at my head. Forrest Gump was the last person wearing crimson that ran as quickly as I did down that alley at Auburn.
That’s not to say that just Auburn fans are wild. Any fan who has survived a trip to Baton Rouge, La., (also known as Death Valley) on a Saturday night can testify to the level of insanity at LSU games. Each team in the Southeastern Conference (and most other major conferences as well) has some of the most deranged citizens one could hope to encounter.
As an Alabama fan, few things bother me more than those two old guys waving around the roll of toilet paper stapled to the top of a Tide detergent box. A great idea, sure, but now that they have been doing it for 40 years, I suspect it just might be time to find something new to wave around.
What is responsible for this? Why do people, especially in the South, wake up and go to sleep for a group of 20-year old kids running around on a football field? I am a huge fan, yet I have no logical reason for feeling so deeply rooted in college football.
Plenty of hardcore fans read this paper, so this article can serve as a survey of sorts. If you have any idea why people in the South take football so seriously, e-mail me and let me know. There are no right or wrong answers, just what you provide me. Some of the responses may be published next week in this space. My e-mail address is provided at the bottom of this article and I look forward to hearing from you.
Josh Johnson is a junior broadcast meteorology major. Send comments to [email protected]