Thankfully, as a nation, we still have sport and play and rivalries and school spirit, which reward and embrace us, giving us new experiences and memories, atop layers of the old.
I am biased and favor college football as a small handful of sports of choice, but in many ways, I can never get too much of our Southeastern Conference, particularly SEC Football.Mary L. Crane, my maternal grandmother, gifted me and my brotherwith childhood trips with her to see the then-expansion NFL franchise Atlanta Falcons play at Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium.The stadium was designed for baseball, the baseball diamond spent most all of fall and winter as a muddy patch across the then-real grass football playing field.
Though I would follow the Falcons and the NFL, all the way out of high school, the NFL fell off the radar for me, roughly two or three strikes ago.
College football is tribal, laden with traditions and legend and unparalleled fandom and mascot antics.And our SEC has more than just the sunbelt, winning coaches and the world’s most beautiful co-edsgoing for us to coax Missouri, Texas A&M and now Oklahoma and Texas to leave their respective conferences for the greener pastures and greener TV contracts of the SEC.Georgia’s first National Championship win came in 1980 during my sophomore year at UGA.
Road games are also part of this experience, with me making the most of every meeting of Georgia v. Auburn, the South’s oldest college football rivalry since 1980, and attending a significant majority of the Georgia/Florida game (The World’s Largest Cocktail Party) in Jacksonville, Florida, as well.
In the SEC East, the only stadium I have not yet ventured into is Kentucky’s in Lexington, but I will get there.In the SEC West, I have not yet seen the Aggie’s home turf at Texas A&M, and though I’ve always enjoyed Little Rock, Arkansas, I’ve not yet made it over to Fayetteville. But I do plan to be in Austin and at the University of Texas for the Dawg’s first in-conference home game with the Longhorns.As of now, I don’t have Norman, Oklahoma, on my bucket list.
But as the Big 12 becomes 14 (with some new team back-filling) and our SEC balloons to 16, the winds of change are blowing.The SEC East and West divisions will soon cease to be.The four new teams would all geographically fall west of the Mississippi River and the conference divisions would be imbalanced. The SEC Championship will remain on the first Saturday in December, but the match will no longer feature the champions of the East and West divisions.Fixed positions on rival team schedules are about to fade as cross-team contracts come up for renewal.For the 2024 season, only Georgia/Florida and Georgia/Georgia Tech, the latter being the home state championship and Saturday after Thanksgiving have fixed positions on the Dawgs season calendar You will hear of marriages ending in divorce with a pair of SEC team tickets being among the most hotly contested joint marital assets.You may have the pleasure of meeting families with children, grandchildren, and occasionally even great-grandchildren running around with them at tailgates.Hotel rooms in almost every college football town in the SEC sell out, at incredibly inflated rates, requiring a minimum two-night stay, almost a full year in advance.
There is something about hearing your alma mater lilting through the air, with the force of a big brass band, followed by cheerleaders, your school team, and the raucous and celebratory atmosphere of a game day.And though I am clearly partial to Athens, Georgia, the Grove in Oxford, Mississippi, the Quad and campus of the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, nose-bleed seats at Neyland Stadium in Knoxville, overlooking the Tennessee River ... and other impressive sites and gatherings, including some incredible posture by both the athletes and each campus and their co-eds, even the game road trips that we lose are made worthwhile.
So, while it is nice to dream of the potential Three-Peat and another year at the top, the SEC and my Dawgs have yet another fan for life. I never played and I don’t bet on the outcome, so though the game always matters, it is also just part of the great show.Georgia football reawakened itself last week, with our Dawgs over the Cats in a pretty imposing way. If we letThose Dawgsout for the rest of this season, I will end 2023 with another smile on my face.Loran ... what have you got?
