Posted on 12/05/2008 12:54:10 PM PST by bamahead
College football has been conquered, in nearly every respect, by the Deep South.
The Southeastern Conference, a 76-year-old coalition of 12 universities in nine Southern states stretching from Louisiana to Florida, has won three national college football titles in five years, including the last two by blowout, and has an unrivaled 11-4 record in the Bowl Championship Series since 1999.
Its teams lead the nation in average attendance, have five of the 12 highest-paid coaches in college football and just signed two broadcast deals worth as much as $3 billion over the next 15 years. Tomorrow, Alabama and Florida, ranked No. 1 and No. 2 by the Associated Press, play for the conference title -- with the winner likely heading to the national title game.
The engine of this success is college football's unshakable primacy in Southern culture -- plus the recent shifts in population and wealth, the protection of politicians and some prescient financial moves by the conference that have reinforced it.
In recent years, the South has undergone rapid growth. Twenty-seven of the 50 fastest-growing metropolitan regions in the country in 2007 were in the South, while personal-income growth in the region outpaced the national average over the past decade. These changes have added muscle to the South's historic passion for college football. While they rank low in many measures like per-capita income and educational achievement, states like Alabama and Mississippi rank close to the top in the percentage of high-school students who play football. And among states that have more than 10 native sons playing in the National Football League, the top six producers by percentage of population are Louisiana, Mississippi, South Carolina, Alabama, Florida and Georgia...
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
Well, Col.
I’m a Tennessee alum...I agree with that, but don’t forget those “damn” Gators....Won back-to-back NCAA titles in basketball....
It’s not just that.
Let’s say you are a very highly rated high school athlete in say Orange Ohio.
Ohio State wants to give you a scholarship as does Penn. State, U. Miami, U of Florida etc. You go for a recruiting trip to Ohio State campus and there is a foot of snow and it is lousy.
Then the next week you visit U. of Florida. It is 78 and there is a 4 mile per hour gentle breeze. They take you an hour south to Disney World. And an hour east to Daytona to check our the chickies and maybe go offshore fishing.
The next day you get back on that plane to Orange Ohio or
Cedar Rapids Iowa and all you can think is what do I have to do to get back to Florida?
Do I have to wait 40 til I retire?
Noooo they sign letters of intent with a Florida school.
College footba11 rocks because there aren’t a bunch of overpaid thugs with a God complex focused on “me, me, me.”
A long term truth for sure .. but this year the Big 12 (especially in the South) is head and shoulders above the pack.
I forgot Arkansas. They take their basketball seriously also.
A school in Minnesota, IIRC.
Well, we try to....*G* (just kiddin’)
Make both teams run around the building for 45 minutes; Make 3 of them sit out; let them play for 5 minutes; most points wins.
Actually, all it says is the best highschool athletes would rather play in warm weather, and in areas where the cheerleaders don’t have to wear freakin sweatsuits during the games...(chuckle)
Smart young men, doin what they have to do genetically, folks.
“Noooo they sign letters of intent with a Florida school.”
Some maybe. But remember, these are kids. Many kids want to be close to mom and dad. If what you say was true, then when we all graduated, we’d all move to the south.
I didn’t. There are aspects of the north people love. The biggest problem with the north is all the darn libs.
Big12 South is the strongest conference in the land this year. WSJ should stick to stuff they know......And big talk sounds better after you have walked the walk.
So Miami is part of the Cuban league?
I'll give you Miami and Atlanta. Houston and Texas aren't in the territory discussed. New Orleans...well, its the Saints. The others are all relatively new teams or new to the area.
Yeah.... not so much, buddy.
Pull your panties out of yer crack.
That explains why Terrelle Pryor went to a Florida school, right?
Right ...
Atlanta Falcons
Carolina Panthers
Dallas Cowboys
Houston Texans
Jacksonville Jaguars
Miami Dolphins
New Orleans Saints
Tampa Bay Buccaneers
Tennessee Titans
I can’t believe they finally acknowledged it!
The SEC has been the only REAL competition for 50 years.
Where do you think that the NFL gets their players? While most players, the silent majority, are just normal citizens, almost every NFL troublemaker is a veteran of college football.
And some grow up with a family tradition of going to a particular school. Every high school football player in Michigan dreams of playing in The Big House (well, maybe not this year).
When I was at Bama, basketball games were regularly sold out. Wimp was coach, and he had James Robinson, Latrell Sprewell, and Robert Horry on the same team. I went to basketball games, football games, and gymnastics meets. Oh, I went to some track meets as well to see a good friend compete. I’m sure if we lived close, we would go to softball games now that Bama has a softball program.
Will the WSJ do a story on how women’s gymnastics is biggest in the SEC?????????
Whoa...this is getting more exciting than a Freeper/Daily Kos “Raslin” match.
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