[NU Sports] yup

[MHRJGScott at aol.com]

    *    
 
 
 
 







 
 
 
What the Rise of Southern Football Says About America 
The South is dominating college football like never before,  but its ascent 
isn't just a matter of good coaching. How a population boom and a  growing 
economy have helped turn a regional obsession into a national  juggernaut.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. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
View Full Image


Getty Images  
Florida quarterback Tim Tebow, top, carries the ball  against Georgia in 
November.
 
 





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. 
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." 
 
 
 
 
 
 
View Full Image


Getty Images  
ROLL TIDE: Alabama's Marquis Maze scores  against rival Auburn last week. The 
Crimson Tide plays Florida tomorrow for a  shot at the national title game.
 
 





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. 
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." 
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. 
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." 
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  s
hoot 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. 
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. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
View Full Image


Elizabeth Olivier  
Tennessee player Morgan Cox, left, shakes hands with a  fan during 
Tennessee's traditional pregame Vol Walk.
 
 





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. 
The historical knock on SEC schools among rivals is that their success is  
predicated on a willingness to stockpile great players by violating NCAA rules  
on recruiting and athlete benefits. While some of the sanctions have been 
minor,  every SEC school but Vanderbilt has been on probation in the last 25 
years. 
Another charge is that lower academic standards give SEC teams an advantage  
in recruiting. Just three SEC schools -- Vanderbilt, Florida and Georgia -- 
were  cited among the top 80 universities in U.S. News & World Report's 2009  
college rankings, while all 11 members of the Big Ten were in the top 80. Last  
year, in a statement on that conference's Web site, Big Ten Commissioner Jim  
Delany wrote: "I love speed and the SEC has great speed ... but there are  
appropriate balances when mixing academics and athletics." Mr. Delany declined  
to comment for this story. 
SEC commissioner Mike Slive says the SEC has made a point of cleaning up the  
practices that have led to NCAA sanctions, and that the academic performance 
of  its athletes has improved and all SEC schools are in compliance with the 
NCAA's  new academic guidelines for athletes. Because the SEC's schools are 
located in a  economically challenged region, Mr. Slive says, they serve a 
different mission  -- to provide opportunity. "There are differences in elementary 
and  secondary-school systems in this part of the country," he says. 
While Mr. Slive says he doesn't resent comparisons to other conferences, the  
SEC should come out ahead in many of them. "The reality is that this league 
has  taken care 






**************Make your life easier with all your friends, email, and 
favorite sites in one place.  Try it now. 
(http://www.aol.com/?optin=new-dp&icid=aolcom40vanity&ncid=emlcntaolcom00000010)