Dixie Babble

Well, that was anticlimactic.

Deprived of an exciting game to discuss last night, ESPN’s Brent Burgundy Musburger filled a few minutes (and blew up Twitter) by . . . um, lavishing praise on the girlfriend of Alabama QB A.J. McCarron (she’s also Miss Alabama, because of course she is).  Just before his drool shorted out the mike, he urged “youngsters in Alabama” to go throw a football around the backyard with their dads, apparently so that each and every one of them could someday have a good-looking girlfriend like A.J.’s.

Nevermind (for now) the antediluvian sexual politics at play in that statement – does Brent really think there are any Alabama “youngsters,” at all inclined and capable, who aren’t already tossing a football every chance they get?

Much has been and will be made about the various ridiculous streaks that the Tide continued last night.  The University of Alabama has now won two straight national titles, and three out of the last four; the state of Alabama, however, has won all four in a row, since the Tide’s streak was interrupted only by their rivals at Auburn.  An SEC team has won the last seven BCS championships in a row, but that’s misleading: no one’s seen Kentucky, Vandy, and Arkansas contending for the big prize.

Only four SEC teams, each from a Gulf Coast state, have won those seven straight titles: Florida, Louisiana State, Auburn, and Alabama.  If you throw in Texas from the Big 12, then schools from Gulf Coast states have won the last eight straight national championships.  Throw in Miami and Florida State, and the Gulf Coast has won 11 of the 15 BCS Championship games played since 1998.  Remember that Tennessee won the very first BCS title, after the ’98 season, and you realize that the South has NOT sent forth the best college football team in the country only three times since Bill Clinton was president.

This isn’t extraordinary; this is cotton-pickin’ ridiculous.  This threatens to make college football a regional niche sport, if it keeps up.

Nor is this a case of big programs importing the best talent from all over the country.  This is, with one major exception, a homegrown phenomenon.  My quick, unscientific survey (i.e., finding the rosters online and counting) finds that of the 116 players on the Crimson Tide’s official roster, 48 are from the state of Alabama, and a whopping 104 are from the South (including Florida and Texas, but not Maryland).

Heck, Notre Dame’s roster includes 29 players from the South (most of them from Texas, Florida, and North Carolina), compared to 34 from the Fighting Irish’s traditional recruiting grounds in the Greater Rust Belt: Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, and Michigan.

Much has been and will be made about how and why football is such a big deal down here, how and why we apparently do “do football better down South”; there’s a lot of words about pride and fear, and a lot of metaphors involving forges and furnaces.  All that is true and has its place – that place usually being the bright and hopeful start of the season – but in the cold light of another SEC championship, the more prosaic answers look more right.

This ‘Outside the Lines’ article, from nearly a year ago, sums up most of the reasons why the South keeps playing such fine football, but only touches briefly on two of the most important:

One, it’s warmer here.  Perhaps you’ve noticed.  Spring starts earlier; fall lasts longer.  As fun as it is to play tackle football in the snow, better weather makes for more practice.  Maybe global warming will level the playing field by melting the snow off of it.

Two, the Rust Belt is, you know, rusting.  The population is shifting South, and has been for a long while now.  Houston is the fourth-largest city in the nation, and is gaining on Chicago.  The kids who grew up playing football in the shadows of steel mills and auto plants have moved to Florida and Texas and the Carolinas, and their kids are growing up playing football in the shadow of the SEC’s dominance.

Charlotte, for instance, with no real native football tradition to speak of, suddenly has become a hotbed of high school football and college recruiting, with players from the Charlotte metro seeing significant playing time for both the Tide and the Irish.  Much of this is just a question of numbers: the population of the Charlotte area grew by 64.6% from 2000 to 2010, and more people means a better chance of more and better players.  Some of this, though, is the unintended consequences of the football culture.  The Carolina Panthers joined the NFL in 1995; since then, it seems like every time I listen to Charlotte sports talk radio, I hear about another retired Panther who’s stayed in Charlotte and volunteers to help coach a youth or high school team.  Nine-year-olds in Charlotte are getting coaching tips from former pros.  Repeat that pattern all over the region, and imagine the head start these Sun Belt kids have.  Imagine all the Alabamians not yet born, who will learn the game from coaches who are learning the game from Nick Saban.

Today – probably right at this moment – footballs are filling a thousand pockets of the Southern air, tossed and caught by kids who love the game for the game itself, with or without a shot at Miss Alabama.