As I get older, I’ve noticed that my interest in football has greatly diminished. Still, I listen patiently as I’m told tales of the superiority of SEC and Southern teams generally. I’ve come to assume that the real national championship game is the Iron Bowl between Auburn and Alabama. And I’ve marveled at the uncanny ability of Florida State to play very unevenly and to be distracted by possibly criminal behavior and still never lose. How many teams this year were stuck with saying we had Florida State beat, but then something

I did sit down last night to watch the semi-final games, just because there have never been such games before.

Well, I’ve been told that Oregon doesn’t play anyone challenging and is, at best, a pretty good team with a great quarterback (well, not great enough to actually rival the Florida State guy when they both hit the NFL). It turns out that they’re a very physically dominant team with a very good quarterback. I’ve never seen so many turnovers forced in a matter of minutes. Florida State just gave up in a way that’s not supposed to be characteristic of Southern men. Not only that, they were so humiliated that they didn’t think of themselves as worthy of shaking the hands of the stronger men who had vanquished them. Well, the FSU quarterback displayed himself as magnanimous enough to be worthy — or maybe he knew he couldn’t afford to tarnish his brand even more and be the future of the NFL. We’re left with trying to explain that Florida is not really in the South. (The Oregon players weren’t so classy either in celebrating their victory; it turns out they’re not the nice folks from Portlandia.)

We might want to say that the gods were against FSU this particular day. They had used up the amount of good luck typically allocated to a dozen teams earlier in the season. That was certainly Notre Dame’s excuse a couple of years ago in its humiliating loss to Alabama after a fluky undefeated season. But then we remember that the turnovers weren’t gifts of the gods but were forced by mere mortals.

Pardon me the impious thought that the Ohio State–Alabama game managed to be close yet boring. It was certainly a humiliating revelation to every Southern fan that the two teams were evenly matched when it comes to raw ability and strategic preparation. It turns out that those Buckeyes are every bit as quick as the Crimson Tide. Still, neither team was very offensive in the second half. For some reason, Alabama seemed to play much of the fourth quarter in slow motion. (Remember that in the second half they ran Auburn into the ground.) That didn’t mean only being a step late in key encounters. Their final drive — which was ineptly handed to them by Ohio State — failed mainly because of time wasted between plays. Both teams played hard and honorably, and the truth seems to be that this wasn’t a dominant year for either Alabama or the SEC. We Southerners don’t want to remember that OSU, after all, was playing with its third-string quarterback.

Overall, the season is coming to a close with all sorts of evidence for national football parity. The exceptions seem to be the real greatness of the unjustly dissed Oregon and TCU. So the Southern strategy will be to remember that Texas is (at least more than Florida) part of the South, and TCU could have beaten Oregon if given the chance.

Well, Ohio State might beat Oregon. But, from our view down here, that’s not a game worth watching, and that outcome would alter our strategy only slightly.