I woke up on Tuesday morning and found that it reminded me a lot of a lot of Saturday and Sunday mornings I have been recently experiencing. My head hurt, my stomach was sick, my eyes were swollen and I found myself asking the same questions aloud; "What happened?" , "What?" and "Why?". Now grant it on Saturdays and Sundays the reasons for those questions were drastically different, but the feeling was the same, you see for the second time in 2 seasons, and for the third championship game in a row, the Ohio State Buckeyes found themselves on the losing end of a title game. As I looked over a recording of the game I had TiVo'd, I realized the result was inevitable. LSU was simply the better team, OSU needed to pitch a perfect game and they did not do it. Sure it was a home game for the Tigers, sure the SEC hype was nausiating (to be addressed later) but football comes down to talent. Despite Ohio State holding a lot of the market share of talent the last few years, LSU was the better team and played as such.
There was a point at the end of the game however that really irked me. You see at the end of the game, the raucous LSU faithful (notice I said L-S-U) began chanting S-E-C. Surely I had misheard this, so I double clicked my little TiVo controller and played it back again, lo an behold there it was....S-E-C....S-E-C....It really was about the most confusing thing I have ever witnessed, but then I got to thinking. The LSU faithful were not only proud of their team's superiority, but they were proud that for the second year in a row, their conference can boast the national champion of college football, surely that is noble, right? As a quirky little man once said, "NOT SO FAST MY FRIEND"
--I spoke to a Florida Gator fan at work. He rubbed in LSU's win as if it was 2007 and the Gators were national champs still.--Then there was the Tennesse Volunteer fan at the bar who acted as if Peyton Manning himself lead the charge against the Buckeyes to win the crown.
--Finally, a South Carolina fan (I didn't even know these existed in Illinois) told me that Ohio State wouldn't last 5 minutes in the SEC and that LSU's win showed how great the conference was.
At this, the light went off. What do all three of these fans have in common? Thei favorite team lost to LSU, the newly crowned champion of college football. It wasn't conference pride they were boasting about. They were justifying their team's otherwise uneventfull seasons. Short of the Gator's who witnessed a Heisman winner and the Vols who backed into an SEC title game they had no business beingn (Score be damned, LSU was looking ahead), all three of these teams had high hopes that were dashed. Plain and simple. But to act that a win for LSU was a win for them? My hatred for the SEC died. See, I refuse to hate the moronic, fanatic, or retarded. Its not their fault. They were made that way.
Ohio State, like Notre Dame, USC, and Florida State, has a stamp on them that's pretty cut and dry and even harder to get rid of. Either fans love them, or fans hate them. There is no in between. I had two personal friends who normally don the Maize and Blue all season root against my beloved Bucks....and I was ok with that. They weren't cheering for a conference. They were cheering against their bitter rivals. And hats off to them for doing so. I found myself rooting for the Florida Gators on New Years day in their contest against that team up north. Does Red Sox Nation cheer for the Evil Empire because the AL East is represented in the Pennant? Will Bear fans world wide be pulling for the Packers in the NFL because the NFC North is being represented? Do fans of the Toronto Maple Leafs cheer on the Montreal Canadians when the Habs are questing for Lord Stanley's Cup? Hell no. They don't. Why? Because most right thinking sports fans understand a rivalry. They understand hatred for another team and its fans and its band and its city or school, and its colors, and its street signs, and its girls (ok, maybe not this one), and its stupid cheers and tradtions, and its coaches, and its success. When your team is embroiled in a century long rivalry, anything short of a massacre at the hands of another team is a disapointment.
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