
Where Football Season Never Ends
Unless you are immersed in the history and traditions of southern football, you may have the television, radio or newspaper impression that the football season is starting. Those of us who have followed southern football since before the NFL thought it appropriate to place one of their teams further south than the nation’s capital, we know better.
For a football season to start, it has to end and, of course, it doesn’t. Let me give you some information, if you grew up in a place where playing hockey was really considered an alternative to soccer or where the end of the professional baseball season was more important than Thursday night football in high school.
Football in the north and football in the south are very different things. In the north, you receive a ticket to the stadium ten minutes before the game starts. Down south, you put your name on a waiting list ten months before a game, pay a second mortgage in a booster club trailer, and read an obituary on the spot. There was a divorce, and I was told murder, about who actually had the family season ticket.
If a good old Alabama graduate marries a prima donna Bandar Dadu Online Terbesar from Auburn or the son of a lawyer who graduated with Ole Miss and married the daughter of a Mississippi farmer, we call it mixed marriage. Guns are not allowed at family gatherings.
Parking at a football game also illustrates the difference. In the north, universities open campuses for parking hours before game time. In southern RVS, the sports school flag arrived on Wednesday and started smoking smokers.
Unauthorized use means something else in the south. In the north, a tailgating meal consists of sausage on the grill or an avocado sandwich and maybe a beer with lemon, all served on portable picnic tables. In the south, a 30-foot-tall smoker in the shape of a personalized pig caught fire at dawn. Cooking contests are the only activity that begins to rival a football match. The winners want their trophies buried with them and something like “Best Pig Supplier” on their tombstones.
In the north the university still engages in such ancient activities, the prom queen plays field hockey and majors in women’s studies, while in the south the prom queen may become the future Miss America. In the north, both stadiums and campuses were empty as soon as the band finished their medley in the performance’s classical music interval. In the south, when the game is over, another rib goes to the smoker. Someone made a cold drink, all the parts of the contest just discussed were discussed and planning started for next week’s game.
Of course, there’s also a different way of handling class after the ESPN game on Thursday night. In the north, students and teachers may not participate in games because classes are on Fridays. In the south, teachers cancel classes because, even if some students do come to class, they are drunk.
The football season lasts all year round, moving from the recruiting game, to spring training, to NCAA investigations, to pre-season training and back into the game. In the southern football season it never ends and everything is fine with me.