SEC fatigue is a very real and dangerous condition that affects college football fans across this great nation, but the home treatment method of whining and caviling may not be the best remedy for the infirmity.
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A disclaimer before this column gets rolling…
I went to an SEC school. I still cheer for that SEC school. I buy into the fact that for the better part of a decade or more, the SEC was the best and most dominant conference in college football. That may not necessarily be the case now…then again, it just might.
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As for the perceived “SEC bias” employed by ESPN and other networks, well, that simply doesn’t exist. It’s a product of supersaturation and paranoia by other fans. College GameDay didn’t even hit an SEC game until the fifth week of the season last year, and they have traveled to Ohio State more than any other school.
And if you don’t think ratings and dollars have something to do with it, then listen to how it was explained to me recently by ESPN College GameDay producer Lee Fitting when he said, “Forty-seven percent of [College GameDay] viewership comes from the Southeastern United States”
That’s a far bigger slab of meat-eating, beer-guzzling, shot-pounding Americans screaming at their televisions than any other sector of the nation…and these are the people who don’t even like Kirk Herbstreit. Of course ESPN is going to make sure that audience is placated.
The networks are going to cover teams who win and draw ratings. Right now you can’t swing a dead cat in a newsstand without hitting something that has Ohio State or Urban Meyer on the cover, and you can’t turn on a television without a gratuitous camera shot of Jon “The Big Nut” Peters on your screen, so put the SEC bias conspiracy to bed and concentrate on what’s real.
But this isn’t about propping up the SEC, or trying to defend the fact that the conference has a record 10 teams perched among the Associated Press Top 25 after the first week of the season. This isn’t about arguing non-conference schedule strength or travel itineraries. It’s not even about whether or not the SEC can still be considered top dog in college football.
Jan 12, 2015; Arlington, TX, USA; Ohio State Buckeyes fan Jon Peters poses for a photo before the 2015 CFP National Championship Game against the Oregon Ducks at AT&T Stadium. Mandatory Credit: John David Mercer-USA TODAY Sports
They actually aren’t right now. At least not at the very top.
The honor belongs to Ohio State, who did in 2014-15 what they had been unsuccessfully trying to do for years during the Jim Tressel era – beat the SEC in a game that mattered.
They did it. They knocked off No. 1 Alabama in a national semifinal playoff game and went on to win an undisputed national championship. And they weren’t even the first one to do it. Florida State picked off Auburn the year before in the BCS Championship game to end the streak of seven straight titles by the S-E-C…S-E-C…S-E-C….
But it didn’t matter. None of it mattered, not even a little.
The SEC still got their own network, backed by the all-powerful Oz of sports, ESPN (really folks, pay no attention to that man behind the curtain in Bristol). The SEC still gets plenty of television time and notice from the voters. It’s as if they’d never lost.
Why? Why does the SEC still get all the love?
You still don’t get it, do you?
About 10 years ago, the SEC nation did something that no other group of fans had ever done in collegiate sports before. They banded together as one and took on a sense of pride in their conference. As long as they weren’t playing each other, they were (with some notable exceptions) able to stomach pulling for a rival team who was playing out of conference, especially in bowl games.
Those of you who have brothers or sisters will get it, if you really think about it. You say the most mean, awful, disparaging and insulting things to your siblings. You may even beat them up a time or two. But god forbid if anyone outside the family lays a finger on them.
It’s family first…sibling rivalry second.
Like it or not, that’s the model SEC fans used…and it worked, and still works today.
It just happens to be the same reason they get attention from the media. If you take a bunch of small nations with decent armies, you might get someone paying attention to one or two of them, but nobody is going to keep an eye on them all.
But pull those armies together, and suddenly you have a force to be reckoned with and everyone is talking about them, even if they’ve never fought a single battle. The voices of 14 SEC fan bases in unison will get far more attention and carry much more weight than those of a single school. It’s only natural.
South Bound & Down
So what can you do if you want things to change?
Beat them on the field? Obviously that’s not having the desired affect.
Troll them? Ants at a picnic. No good.
If you grow weary of this continued thick undercoating of the SEC in everything college football related, you have to think the way the SEC thinks, and stop hating the conference for showing unity.
Yes, you have to pull for rivals when they aren’t playing you or someone who can affect your conference standings.
Can you do that, Buckeye fans? Can you find it in your stomach to actually pull for that team up North when they face someone from the SEC or Pac-12? Is it in your DNA, Longhorn fans, to give a hearty Boomer Sooner when Oklahoma locks it up with Tennessee or Florida State? Because that’s what it’s going to take. What about you, Bruins from the West Coast, do your vocal chords even have the capacity to meekly emit a faint “Fight on?”? Because that’s the secret to beating down the plague.
If you don’t have the intestinal fortitude to make your enemy’s enemy your friend, then you don’t stand a chance of knocking the SEC off the mountain top, regardless of whether or not they win the next championship or two.
Whining, finger pointing, conspiracy theories, statistic maneuvering…all these things might give you temporary relief, but in the end that SEC fatigue will come back with even more thew and make your beer taste bad, your hot wings seem languid, and make your eye twitch like a government witness.
Do you have it in you? Because the fans and conference you love to hate so much certainly do.
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