It’s the fall, y’all!

 

Two weeks until everything starts in the SEC, and our hearts are skipping a couple of beats just thinking about it.

We start humming our team’s fight songs, start talking to The Lord about bringing glory to the flag we’ve got hung outside our house, and try and sort out where we’re going for the tailgate.

Our stadiums are sporting caverns, housed by craziness in orange, blue, crimson yellow-out…whatever. Of course the gimmicks are fun (once a year), but the traditional khaki-on-Saturday that is worn by the corps at Texas A&M Corps at Texas A&M was, is, and always will be (so will Midnight Yell, by the way). The stage is a green normally reserved for The Masters (we still resent you, Missouri, for not growing grass), and the hedges at Georgia (with a nod to Alabama, Auburn, South Carolina, and Mississippi State) are also sexy, too.  Our end-zones and lettering are as beautiful as the sport on the turf, and every weekend, about 80,000+ are invited. It’ about the wow at the soaring eagle, the bulldog, Mike, the Schooner and Bevo. We make usual jokes at Florida and Alabama not bringing live animal mascots to the games, but we’d like to throw in a Razorback as an animal-you-would-not-like-to-mess-with, too.

And when things don’t go our way, we’re OK with filling the grass with trash.

We know the traffic after the games is going to suck because almost all of our campuses are nowhere near a good highway, but patience, darlin’, patience. It’s going to be OK.

 

We hear you, snobs. We know that we’re not Ivy League (save for our brothers in Nashville), but most of our schools are hard to get into now. If you don’t believe me, ask someone who’s kids have tried to get into the University of Texas, Florida or Georgia recently. It ain’t easy.

But you know what’s easy? The fans. On the eye. And no, we’re not just talking about our drop-dead gorgeous co-eds from Oklahoma with their cutest blonde hair, cowboy boots and pin saying how their sorority roots for the school or sweeping hair and polos, but there’s also 80-year Mrs Hawkins from Oxford, MS, who just thumped her grandson for driving over 18mph last Monday. She hasn’t missed a game in 60 years, and she’s not about to now. This weekend Mrs Hawkins will be attending two churches this weekend – the one at Vaught-Hemmingway and St Peter’s Episcopal on the Sunday, where no doubt the game will get broken down by congregation and head pastor with equal fervor.

The biggest warning we give to outsiders marrying into the conference is this: Don’t marry in the Fall. Or get engaged. If the Vols lost in the afternoon and you’re having an engagement celebration to go to in the evening, make sure your host looks at the scoreline before it finishes, and ask him to make the bar open if Big Orange is on the bad end of the scoreline. It might make people a little happier.

We love to play fight songs at our weddings. Rocky Top for Tennessee, ‘Sky Rockets In Flight’ for Alabama will work, and although Baba O’Reilly might be awesome for Georgia fans, the stories about how the floors at Johnny Smyth’s wedding in Columbia SHOOK when the DJ dropped ‘Sandstorm’ will be better. We don’t mind cross-SEC weddings, as long as everyone’s nice to each other on Saturday. We know that it’s unlikely to happen, but still.

The SEC life isn’t so much the game as the tailgate. LSU fans will happily feed you gumbo and give you abuse almost at the same time, but if you give it back, then the shot’s on them. The Ole Miss Grove is probably the most celebrated, but this is SEC Country, man. We’ve tasted the barbecue in College Station doled out to us by a family who’s been doing this stuff for generations, and it’ll kick your barbecue’s ass every day of the week and twice on Saturday. Oh, and if you and your buddies have to hear Uncle John’s story about how he punched the lights out of five Kansas fans (up from four the year before) at the tailgate outside Faurot one more f***ing time, you’ll want to scream, but that’s fine. He’s brought the grain alcohol and you’re out of the Bud Light, and you’re plus 8.5 against Oklahoma.

Look, we’re trying to keep things nice. We are very good at the Bullshitface when we tell Auntie Maude’s friends who have come in from Fayetteville for the game that we hope they have a great time at Jordan-Hare when we really hope that their starting QB gets injured on the opening snap, we score 900, and the trees are paper-wrapped by midway-through the fourth quarter.

Speaking of Bullshitface don’t worry about that at the Red River, Cocktail Party or Iron Bowl. Texas and Oklahoma despise each other in the same way as Florida and Georgia do in the same way as Alabama and Auburn do. There’s also the in-state rivalries we love, too. Mark Stoops got a contract extension because Kentucky beat Louisville. Shane Beamer already won a Palmetto Championship by beating Clemson, Florida’s crushing of Florida State was hellacious amusement, Good Ole’ Fashioned Hate that is Georgia – Georgia Tech was actually a good game this year.

We love our rivalries. We feast on rivalries. You wanna know why the Worldwide Leader dropped all those bills on the SEC? Because our teams are the best and our fans are the most passionate. There might be fanbases with crazed idiots all over the country, but sorry, we couldn’t hear you over our cowbell. The games are toss-ups, which means more fun, more heroes and if you’re a Vanderbilt fan after they toppled Bama last year, more fun.

We’d love to tell you that SEC Football is the only game in town for our schools, but the problem is is we’re mighty good at other sports, too. We can’t stop winning National Championships in baseball, softball basketball and other sports. Winning is what we live on, and we’re damn good at it. Yes, we know that Kentucky’s a basketball school and always has been, but hey – the Wildcats paid Mark Stoops a bunch of money for something, didn’t they?

Oh, and the guys on the field are pretty exceptional, too. I don’t remember the last time the SEC didn’t have the most NFL Draft picks was in 2006. Hell, this year’s crop of incoming freshmen weren’t even born then.

A great player at a SEC school is fine. There are an awful lot of them. A player who gets a team a Heisman is fantastic. A player who leads the team to a National Championship is God. A coach who coaches the team to a National Championship is God Almighty. The guy Nick Saban has SEVEN National Championships to his name…and he’s buried a lot of coaches who have tried to beat him, too (And when Alabama got beat, it was more about ‘beating Saban’ than it was beating Alabama!).

We’re not 100% cultish. Some A&M fans will swear that Edward Harold Bell was innocent for his crimes for no other reason that he was an Aggie (He’s dead now, so it doesn’t really matter).

But we’re pretty damned close. Because Saturdays in The Fall are our day to shine. And damn the rest of them if they don’t like it.