What I'm referring to is this new mentality of how SEC fans suddenly support their entire east & west conferences as opposed to just their favorite team. I just read an interesting article about this on Yahoo! Rivals by Olin Buchanan (it's in his 'mailbag' article section...i don't feel like going and linking it right now) where he agrees that it's weird and kind of sad & pompous how all of the sudden, just because the SEC has managed to beat OSU twice in recent years (in the title game too, mind you), southerners are coming out of the wood-work with shirts & slogans & banners about how much they love the SEC in general, and not any specific team. Even fans of total c**p-bombs like Mississippi, Miss State, Arkansas, S. Carolina, Vanderbilt, etc suddenly feel like if LSU & Florida do well, so do they somehow. It's like random 19 & 20 year olds in Mississippi suddenly think they can talk serious football with the likes of OSU, Michigan, PSU, USC, Oregon, Texas, Oklahoma, etc just because they happen to be in the same conference as LSU, Georgia, and Florida (who lost to michigan (who lost to app. state...but that's neither here nor there)).
You don't really see OSU fans talking about how awesome Michigan is and how much they just love the company of the good ol' wolverines, you don't hear Stanford claiming that they should be ranked pre-season top 5 because USC is nasty, and you certainly don't see these team's fans at sporting event's wearing shirt that say "Dude, the Big-Ten totally owns", no, you see that person wearing the shirt of their favorite team only.
What's with this? Is this just some weird, backwards verion of southern pride? Are we about to see t-shirts arise about "the war of northern aggression." And is this funny or just plain sad? If a non-SEC team wins the championship this year, do you think it'll stop?
Tags: