What the Civil War Tells Us About SEC Football

As the nation unraveled in the aftermath of the 1860 election, all eyes fixed on South Carolina, the most pugnacious and truculent of Southern states. Reflecting on the sheer madness of what was about to ensue, a Richmond reporter famously quipped that South Carolina was “too small for a Republic, and too big for an insane asylum.” In many respects, this could often have been rightly said of the South as a whole. Throughout American history, the South has been seen as an odd entity within the larger American body politic; at the same time, though, it remains utterly mainstream American, with a history as integral to the founding, maintenance and success (an failures, to be sure!) of the Republic as any region. This tension in which the South is both utterly American, yet completely marginal makes the region an inscrutable mystery to the observer. It is perfectly within the proper conception of the South to note that the most quintessential American town, the fictional Mayberry, was in North Carolina, while at the same time noting that most of the South would seem like a foreign landscape to any visitor from the north or west more familiar with any of the great metropolitan centers on either coast.

This tension has produced any number of ramifications for both the nation and the region, and they are both unique to the region and operate in a rather predictable manner. The Southern man often sees their institutions as completely integral to, separate from and better than broader national endeavors. As someone who has followed Southern history, I see the chest-thumping in the Southeastern Conference (SEC) as completely within this paradigm. We are told, repeatedly and vociferously, that the SEC plays the best football in the nation, and is utterly dominant and a class above all other conferences. Faster, stronger, better and more entertaining, the SEC plays a brand of football more akin to the NFL than NCAA. Or, so we are told.

Two observations about this Southern football exceptionalism are instantly obvious. First, this is a relatively new phenomenon. In the past, fans of college football were largely fans of their particular conferences. With bowl tie-ins, it was a rare and special occasion in which you actually saw your team play a great team from another conference,
and most people had little, if any, real abiding interest in the goings-on of other conferences, and how highly or lowly another conference was regarded did not really impact your team. If, for example, you won the Pac-10, you went to the Rose Bowl, and that was that. In this context, the recent obsession (largely unrequited) that LSU, for example, has with USC would make no sense. The only real exception to this rule was Notre Dame, a team that has rivalries across the nation, and thus provided something of a harbinger of the intense feelings that football nationalization would bring.

Second, the need to trumpet its own conference remains largely a Southern phenomenon. Even when USC traveled to SEC West Champion Arkansas and dropped 70 on them, neither Pac-10 fans nor USC supporters saw this as evidence of conference superiority. In a part of the country in which regional identity remains a minor thing, there simply is not the same ingrained propensity to see match-ups between teams as referenda on entire regions or conferences. Of course, had LSU invaded the Coliseum and similarly dismantled a Pac-10 power, the narrow view taken by USC would not have been taken by LSU’s fans. Californians –and Oregonians, of course- are proud of and love their states, but Westerners have not gone through war, Reconstruction, poverty and a protracted and bloody racial conflict in the same way that the South has, so whereas an acute inferiority complex remains and integral part of the Southern psyche, the Westerner gains nothing on a psychological level by proclaiming that nobody plays college football like they do out west. On the other hand, history, psychology and memory in the South make it all but inevitable that Southerners would fixate on their own conference and proclaim its superiority.

Interestingly, though in high profile match-ups the SEC has more often played Big Ten teams, its fans reserve their most vitriolic rhetoric for the Pac-10. Again, this also fits within the larger conception of how Southerners see themselves and why so many of them see the Pac-10 as the antithesis of what they are. SEC schools, with the exception of Vanderbilt, are all located in small backwater towns, whereas Pac-10 teams are all within an hour or so of major cities like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Portland and Phoenix. This rural-urban conflict makes Pac-10 success even more insufferable to the largely rural South. Indeed, politically, economically and socially these two regions could not be more different.

Of course, the unanswered question is whether the SEC is actually better than the Pac-10. On the Pac-10 side is the pretty clear advantage that they have had in head-to-head games in the last 15 years. Winning a little better than 60% of the games would suggest that it is the better conference, or at least fatally wound the notion that the SEC is clearly the top conference in the land. Think of it as a corollary to the old Federer-Nadal Rule: if you can’t even beat your principle rival, how you can claim to be the best?

On the SEC side of the argument, they point to their recent dominant performances in the BCS Championship games. The SEC wins titles. This is not the moment to offer a detailed attack on the BCS, but suffice it to say that BCS has enormous flaws in how it picks teams. Among the biggest flaws is that SEC teams have made it to the title game usually by not scheduling a single difficult non-conference opponent. Florida is particularly guilty in this respect. In other words, if you win the SEC with one or no losses, you will make it to the title game. Though Alabama’s game against Virginia Tech this year was a notable exception, if you stack up the non-conference schedules of the top Pac-10, Big Ten and SEC schools over the last ten years, the SEC schools would, in fact, be quite embarrassing.

Going into the bowl season, we will certainly hear a lot about SEC speed, and how the SEC teams dominate all comers from other conferences. Likely, the fact that this year’s SEC entrant, Alabama, was wood-shedded by Utah last year will be ignored. In the end, it is not much worth much effort to try to argue against SEC dominance, not because it isn’t true but because Southerners are simply psychologically and historically predisposed to oppose any notion that suggests that it is anything but a singularly unique and exceptional conference. Similarly, Pac-10 fans should just ignore the rabble coming from Tuscaloosa, Gainesville, Knoxville and the rest of the SEC hamlets because it will continue for reasons that have a lot more to do with Appomattox and Gettysburg than anything that ever happened on a football field.