It all bubbles up from the ground floor. If fans didn't watch more and talk more about football in the South, it wouldn't be this way. But they do. Here's a couple of great examples of
Twitter chatter and
TV ratings from al.com's Jon Solomon that show it. In particular, I love that story from 2010 about the Boise State-Virginia Tech game -- the first college football game of the year. Which major market got the greatest percentage of viewing households? Not one from Virginia or Idaho but one from... Alabama? That's right, Birmingham had a monumental 23.7 percent of households watching a game with no SEC team in it. They just love football.
Face it, folks: The South is better because it cares more than we do. But it's not the polls and rankings that support that premise. It's the results. Anyone who thinks the coming playoff structure will expose the BCS system as biased toward the SEC is in a dream world. Rankings are often misleading. The end-of-season results are not.
And it's not just the SEC but the region of the nation that exudes that passion. From South Carolina to Texas, from Kentucky to Alabama, it's not just the 14 schools of that conference but the entirety of the South that obsesses about the game. Outside of the SEC schools, who were the best college football programs of last season? Also among the Top 20: Louisville, Clemson, Oklahoma, Florida State and Texas. You don't need rankings to tell you that; eyeballs do.
Not only does the South care the most about football, they want you to care about it, too, and have a good time when you come to visit. Three years ago, I wrote
this column about what a wonderful time I had in Alabama when Penn State came to play the Crimson Tide. It wasn't just the passion of the local fans, it was their manners, their charm, their goodwill and, frankly, their natural inclination to have a good time and include visitors in it.
Now, you could debate how much any of us should really care fervently about college football. You could also argue that the South places undue emphasis on football if you wanted. Maybe even at the expense of attentiveness to more important qualities of life.
