What the Rise of Southern Football Says About America

TigerBait3 · Dec 5, 2008

What the Rise of Southern Football Says About America

College football has been conquered, in nearly every respect, by the Deep South.

The Southeastern Conference, a 76-year-old coalition of 12 universities in nine Southern states stretching from Louisiana to Florida, has won three national college football titles in five years, including the last two by blowout, and has an unrivaled 11-4 record in the Bowl Championship Series since 1999.

Its teams lead the nation in average attendance, have five of the 12 highest-paid coaches in college football and just signed two broadcast deals worth as much as $3 billion over the next 15 years. Tomorrow, Alabama and Florida, ranked No. 1 and No. 2 by the Associated Press, play for the conference title -- with the winner likely heading to the national title game.

The engine of this success is college football's unshakable primacy in Southern culture -- plus the recent shifts in population and wealth, the protection of politicians and some prescient financial moves by the conference that have reinforced it.

In recent years, the South has undergone rapid growth. Twenty-seven of the 50 fastest-growing metropolitan regions in the country in 2007 were in the South, while personal-income growth in the region outpaced the national average over the past decade. These changes have added muscle to the South's historic passion for college football. While they rank low in many measures like per-capita income and educational achievement, states like Alabama and Mississippi rank close to the top in the percentage of high-school students who play football. And among states that have more than 10 native sons playing in the National Football League, the top six producers by percentage of population are Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida and Georgia.

Meanwhile, traditional Northern football states like Pennsylvania, which has long sent young men to heralded northern programs like Penn State, Notre Dame and Ohio State and has stocked the NFL for decades, are falling behind. Today there are 45% more native Louisianans (64) than Pennsylvanians (44) in the NFL, even though Louisiana has only one-third of Pennsylvania's population.
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The breadth of the South's football culture creates a fanaticism that crosses all lines. People who didn't attend the schools, or go to college at all, still support them, and will even make donations. It's a group that insiders call "dirt-road alumni." After his business was damaged in Hurricane Katrina, Joe Yargo, a trucker from Hammond, La., who did not attend LSU, says he told his wife "I might lose my house, but I won't lose my season tickets."

"Half the people in that stadium can't spell LSU," says political consultant James Carville, an LSU alumnus. "It doesn't matter. They identify with it. It's culturally such a big deal."

College football also encourages a pride of place; something other popular sports in the south, like Nascar, don't. Karyn Rybacki, a professor at Northern Michigan University, says that's a big deal in the South, where "people will describe themselves as being from Alabama or Georgia even if they've worked in San Francisco for the last 20 years."
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In the 1920s and '30s, Louisiana governor and U.S. Senator Huey Long, who'd won a scholarship to LSU but couldn't afford to attend, set the tone by leading the LSU marching band. The region's politicians have immersed themselves in football ever since, even using their influence on occasion to help them win. When Alabama agreed to pay coach Nick Saban $32 million over eight years in 2007 -- one of the largest college contracts of all time -- Gov. Bob Riley, an Alabama graduate, publicly defended the decision.

In the early 2000s, former South Carolina Gov. Jim Hodges, who attended South Carolina, tried to help the team by meeting high school players it was recruiting. When editors at the Atlanta Journal-Constitution gave a story about a 2006 Georgia Bulldogs loss the headline "Dogs Get Put in Their Place," Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue, a former Georgia player, sent the paper a letter denouncing the tone of the headline and the paper's "poison pens."
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The games themselves have become arenas for politicians to hand out cards, shake hands with donors and even advertise. Former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux recalls sitting at an LSU game in the 1980s and seeing a plane pass overhead carrying a banner for a campaign opponent of his, Henson Moore. "I wanted to shoot it down," he says.

Politicians have been such fixtures at the games that their practice of accepting complimentary tickets has begun to come under criticism. Before this season, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal decided to stop accepting the 10 free tickets his office was allotted.
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JohnLSU · Dec 5, 2008

More from that Wall Street Journal article:

Historians say the sport first became a regional obsession in the South when Alabama upset Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl. At that time, football was an elite sport dominated by Northern schools like Harvard and Notre Dame. The South was a deeply depressed region with half the per-capita income of the rest of the country and very few unifying elements. There were no Major League Baseball teams in the South and modern passions like auto racing were in their infancy. Andrew Doyle, an associate professor of history at Winthrop University, says the ability to compete in college football made Southerners "feel like they were part of the American mainstream."

The sport's profile grew in the '60s and '70s when Alabama coach Paul "Bear" Bryant won six national titles even as the South was being pilloried for its resistance to the Civil Rights movement. Wayne Flynt, a professor emeritus of history at Auburn, says Mr. Bryant's achievements were a point of pride even for Southerners from other states.

The desire to win was so strong it even outweighed racial prejudice -- Mr. Bryant was finally able to freely recruit black players after his team suffered a beating in 1970 at the hands of Southern California, whose star running back, Sam Cunningham, was black. "Nothing did more for racial integration in the South than sport and the military," Mr. Flynt says. Today, expectations are so high that despite the performances of Alabama and Florida, many consider this a down season for the conference because LSU and Georgia lost eight games combined.
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This loyalty extends to the political establishment. Within the nine SEC states, two-thirds of the governors and U.S. senators are SEC alumni. In the eight Midwestern states that make up the Big Ten, just over a third of governors and senators went to one of their states' major football schools.
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Central to the success of the SEC is the ability of its schools to convert this passion into money -- even in a region where there isn't so much to go around. Only three SEC member schools have endowments larger than $1 billion as of the 2007 fiscal year, while half or more of the schools in other major conferences like the Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-10 and Atlantic Coast Conference do. Their average undergraduate enrollment of roughly 18,000 is significantly smaller than the averages for the Big 12 and Pac-10 conferences. The median household income in Ohio, the poorest state represented by the Big Ten, was $4,500 higher than the average median income for all the SEC states last year.

Nonetheless, in 2006, four SEC schools -- Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and LSU -- raised $35 million or more in athletic donations, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education survey. That figure beats every school in the Big 12, Big East and Pac-10 that responded to the survey. (Nine of the 73 major-conference schools, including Southern California, didn't respond.)

The conference has also made some shrewd financial moves. In 1992, the SEC was the first major conference to take advantage of an overlooked NCAA rule that allows conferences to stage a championship game; where the ticket sales and TV rights fees generate large sums for the conference to divvy up. In 1994, the SEC announced an exclusive TV deal with CBS that led to nationally televised games. The deal was recently renewed for $55 million a year over the next 15 years.
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JohnLSU · Dec 5, 2008

A list of the Top 15 most valuable programs going into the 2008 season, by conference:

SEC
Rank# Team Value Profit
3) Georgia Bulldogs $90 Million $43.5 Million
5) Florida Gators $84 Million $38.2 Million
6) Louisiana State Tigers $76 Million $31.7 Million
7) Tennessee Volunteers $74 Million $17.3 Million
8) Auburn Tigers $73 Million $33.9 Million
9) Alabama Crimson Tide $72 Million $31.8 Million
13) South Carolina Gamecocks $69 Million (tie) $28.9 Million
15) Arkansas Razorbacks $53 Million (tie) $19.3 Million

BIG TEN (and Notre Dame)
1) Notre Dame Fighting Irish $101 Million $45.8 Million
4) Michigan Wolverines $85 Million $36.2 Million
10) Ohio State Buckeyes $71 Million $26.6 Million
13) Penn State Nittany Lions $69 Million (tie) $29.4 Million

BIG XII
2) Texas Longhorns $92 Million $46.2 Million
11) Oklahoma Sooners $70 Million $18.5 Million

PAC-10
15) Sou Cal Trojans $53 Million (tie) $13.0 Million

http://bleacherreport.com/articles/...p-value-college-football-team-going-into-2008

JohnLSU · Dec 5, 2008

The Top 30 Biggest American Football Stadiums, by conference/league

SEC
4. Tennessee
7. Georgia
8. LSU
10. Alabama
13. Florida
14. Auburn
22. South Carolina
25. Jacksonville Stadium (Florida/Georgia game)
27. Arkansas

NFL
11. Washington Redskins
23. New York Giants
24. Kansas City Chiefs
25. Jacksonville Jaguars
26. Denver Broncos
30. Miami Dolphins

BIG TEN (and Notre Dame)
1. Penn State
2. Michigan
3. Ohio State
(19. Notre Dame)
20. Wisconsin
29. Mich State

BIG XII
5. Texas
9. Cotton Bowl (Texas/Oklahoma game)
15. Texas A&M
17. Oklahoma
18. Nebraska

PAC-10
6. Los Angeles Coliseum/USC
12. Rose Bowl/UCLA
28. Cal

ACC
16. Florida State
21. Clemson
30. Dolphin Stadium/Miami

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_American_football_stadiums_by_capacity

GregLSU · Dec 5, 2008

Great read. Thanks for posting that. :thumb:

TheDude · Dec 5, 2008

I would have thought bama would be higher. Maybe the full $ effect of Saban has not quite been felt. With the improvement they made this year, I imagine it will increase.

Wonder if ours will go up in a "down year".

locoguano · Dec 6, 2008

"Half the people in that stadium can't spell LSU," says political consultant James Carville, an LSU alumnus. "It doesn't matter. They identify with it. It's culturally such a big deal."
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Carville is f*cking idiot... its a shame you guys have to claim him... He really needs to find a new nickname as well...

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What the Rise of Southern Football Says About America

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