Their disdain for the conference springs from a confusion about the South itself.
Their disdain for the conference springs from a confusion about the South itself.
I grew up in Birmingham, Ala., and I am a die-hard Auburn fan. So I wasn’t exactly happy to see that Georgia beat (the?) Ohio State in the Peach Bowl last night, advancing to the national championship game to defend their title against TCU Horned Frogs. Georgia and Auburn have been facing off almost every year since 1892 in the Deep South’s oldest rivalry. There’s not a lot of love lost between us.
In another sense, though, I was happy to see Georgia win. Not because I dislike Ohio State — I don’t; the Buckeyes played a great game and run a respectable program — but because since moving to Washington, D.C., almost two years ago, hearing the constant slander against the SEC has been almost too much to bear.
Every year, it seems, fans of the ACC, Pac-12, Big 12, and Big Ten suggest that the SEC is overrated. And every year, it seems, another national champion is crowned from the conference. Since 2006, when Tim Tebow and the Florida Gators won the title, a team from the SEC has won twelve of 16 national championships (75 percent). As of 2021, the conference had accrued more bowl wins (97) and appearances (152) than any other conference, posting a .638 winning percentage — the best of any conference in that time period. Surely that counts for something.
But the fact of the matter is that claims that the SEC is overrated have little to do with football. How could they? The conference’s dominance is indisputable. So, what’s all the fuss about? Well, popular opinions about college football are often mere proxies for broader cultural perceptions that people hold toward different areas of the country — in this case, the South.
Push almost any critic to explain his issues with the SEC, and it inevitably leads to quips about how stupid, racist, misogynistic, and xenophobic Southerners are. According to this view, the South is a terrible place to live, a place where many people marry their cousins, refuse to take the vaccine, and — can you believe it — consistently vote Republican.
It would be easy to chalk all this up to politics. The Blue North hates the Red South, or something like that. But the truth is more complicated. After all, I don’t think the average Big Ten, Big 12, or Pac-12 (okay, well, maybe the Pac-12) fan that dislikes the SEC and has a negative impression of the South is what most people would call “progressive.” Certainly not. And the Republican Party — Lincoln’s party — undoubtedly retains an element of opposition to Southern populism within it still, especially in its most elite circles, even though white Southerners have been one of the party’s most reliable voting blocs for decades now.
What’s really going on, then? Are people simply wrong about the South? Well, yes and no. On the one hand, we don’t marry our cousins — not even in Alabama — and in 2023 my hometown of Birmingham is a far cry from how it was in the years when Bull Connor threw Martin Luther King in jail. Thank God! On the other hand, though, the South is a bastion of social conservatism and remains skeptical of far-off elites. And racism, in its various forms, certainly still raises its ugly head.
With that in mind, it’s not so much that people misperceive what the South is, but that they don’t know what to make of it. There is something undeniably awesome about it: From jazz, blues, and country music to barbecue, fried okra (fried anything, really), and — yes — SEC football, greater American popular culture is saturated with Southern exports. And yet, even as people move to the region in droves, the narrative remains that the South is a deeply backwards, unattractive place.
It’s hard to blame anyone for the confusion. What’s bad about the South is so obvious, and what’s good about it is so elusive, mystical even. It seems strange to think that a place that has seen so much suffering could be the source of anything good. And to appreciate it — without dismissing its brokenness or its beauty — requires an almost poetic sense of tragedy, a sort of inborn cognitive dissonance that is only resolved by faith in God’s providence.
But it’s precisely this spiritual element that makes the South — and the SEC — so amazing.
Quantitatively, according to a 2016 Pew study, “Mississippi, Alabama and other Southern states are among the most highly religious states in the nation.” Every school with an SEC team ranks within the top 15 states in terms of the percentage of adults who are “highly religious.”
Qualitatively, there’s just something special about Stetson Bennet — a walk-on from Blackshear, Ga. — throwing a touchdown pass to Adonai Mitchell — whose first name means “My Lord” in Hebrew — to win the Chick-fil-A Peach Bowl in front of tens of thousands of fans. Moments later, at the stroke of midnight, Ohio State’s kicker hooked what would have been the game-winning field goal, sending the ball sailing to the left of the goalpost past a big, neon-green sign that read simply: “John 3:16.” Only in the South!
So, on January 9, when Georgia faces off against Texas Christian University (TCU) — a school that has been doing its best to distance itself from its Christian roots — my fellow Auburn fans will have to forgive me for rooting, at least a little bit, for the Dawgs.
Perhaps William Faulkner put it best in Abasalom, Absalom! when he wrote of the South, “You can’t understand it. You would have to be born there.”