Everything is different now, please keep cheering

We’ve made it past Labor Day and are now in one of the best seasons of the year.  No, of course I’m not talking about election season.  That one never ends anymore.  

We’re back to football season, and in the South, that means college football. Well… at least for a little while longer.  

I’ve written for the past few years on the recurring theme that the game many of us know, love, and for which we will literally ignore family events and gatherings is changing into something else.  Nostalgia continues to propel our allegiance but money continues to trump tradition at every turn.

When I approach this subject, I continue to use the baseline set by the patron saint of Georgia football, barbecue, and other topics of religious importance.  Lewis Grizzard wrote of a conversation between a friend and the friend’s wife during UGA’s win over Notre Dame in the 1981 Sugar Bowl to seal the undisputed National Championship title – then awarded only by polls.

The wife, concerned his friend was getting too worked up, turned to her husband and said “Calm down sweetheart. It’s just a football game.”

Lewis, understanding the heresy as much as his readers would in that era, recounted his friend’s reply and published it as if it were a new gospel.  “It’s not just a football game. It’s our way of life against theirs.”

Explicit in that column was an explanation of why college football was superior to the NFL or other professional sports:

“You can get into all that stuff about the pageantry of college football, the fact that the players are unspoiled kids and not a bunch of millionaires, and it’s a nice way to spend an afternoon or evening with friends. 

But with me and mine, and with a lot of others, college football offers us an opportunity to circle our wagons and fight and kick and scream for our side against their side.”

My oh my, how times have changed.  UGA’s quarterback now drives a Lamborghini. Other schools are now parking their players’ exotic sports cars in front of the entrance for recruits to see upon arrival to check out their football facilities.  

We’ve come a long way from the days of student athletes whose scholarship gave them an opportunity to get an education in exchange for playing sports.  We’re a couple of generations away from Southern Methodist getting the “death penalty” for their football program for too publicly crossing lines that are now a standard part of recruiting.

We know that everything is different, but the game is played in the same places with the players still wearing the same team colors. In my house we pull for the red and black. We abhor Orange or pairing our black with gold.  This is our way of life.  Life is changing, but our loyalties and allegiances are not.  Yet.

I was raised that a proper home would pull for the SEC against all other enemies.  That was before we started adding teams like South Carolina and Arkansas.  Then, somehow Texas – a place that refers to beef as “barbecue” became part of the south, which geographically was a gray area, but then also Missouri?  Really?  

This year brings us another team from Texas.  A team who demonstrated its loyalty to its last conference by starting its own TV network that essentially doomed the viability of the other teams’ ability to get a decent national TV contract.  They bring with them Oklahoma, which is about as “southern” as Missouri I guess.  

It’s hard to muster SEC loyalty to fan bases so dainty that they want penalties called for “horns down” hand gestures.  My guess is the student sections of their opposing teams will have all the hand gestures covered.

If the SEC has blurred the image of geography, the other remaining conferences have dropped all pretenses.  Pacific coast teams have joined the Atlantic Coast Conference.  The “Big 10” now has 18 teams, but only 3 or 4 are actually big.  The ability to get on TV and get us to watch is all that seems to matter.

It doesn’t matter that players can now disappear and be replaced.  That the values of our geographic region can be supplanted by new coalitions forced on us by people in back rooms.  That we can be told what we can and can’t cheer for, and those same people can change these rules too on a dime.

It seems the only thing that is staying the same are the jersey colors.  And it’s the sign of the times.  Whether it’s about the red and black, or red versus blue.  

It doesn’t seem to matter if it’s football season or election season.  We’re still cheering for our team, even if the players, teams, alliances, or rules are anything like they were when we picked our jerseys.  

Keep cheering.  There are a lot of people’s paychecks depending on it.