In praise of Southern football

Just after Florida beat Oklahoma for the BCS Championship in January, no less a source than the Wall Street Journal pronounced Southern football the best in all the land. Typically, the newspaper didn’t look much deeper than proclaiming Tim Tebow the best damned “fullback” to ever throw a jump pass. But as a Yankee who grew up a Notre Dame fan, played in the Ivy League, worked in the Tennessee athletic department, got a law degree in Alabama and married a proud South Carolina Gamecock, I must admit I’m a late and grudging convert to the proposition of Southern football superiority.

APFlorida quarterback Tim Tebow

Even as recently as the early 1990s, when I was working at Tennessee, Southern football had not pulled ahead, and line play and blocking on the perimeter with tight ends and fullbacks were a big reason why. The best Midwestern teams had superior size, strength and discipline at those positions and could gain alleys downfield whether it was the Lou Holtz era Notre Dame power running attack; Ohio State’s stretch play with Orlando Pace leading Eddie George; Nebraska’s option with Tommie Frazier hitting the corner, or Michigan’s pro style sprint draw. All had the ability seal an alley in a defense.

But now, with so many teams playing a spread, there are no corners on opposing defenses, or a need to gain one, and the South has closed the size-speed gap in a bit more than a decade.

It’s More Than Strategy, It’s Style

Yet it’s something else entirely different that makes Southern football (and we’re talking about the college variety) superior. It’s the uncompromising love of the game -- and that love manifests itself in every aspect of Southern life. I was fortunate enough to have caught a first-class upgrade on a flight last week and was seated next to a Citadel grad. Our conversation briefly covered a range of topics, including our favorite Charleston restaurants and our respective methods for maximizing our frequent flier miles. But it ultimately settled on college football. We talked about the Citadel Bulldogs and how Kevin Higgins has helped rebuild that program, the South Carolina Gamecocks and the Clemson Tigers. I’ll remind you that this was in June and we were flying to a state where the governor had recently gone missing. Yet it was football that commanded our attention and that of all men and women of a certain age and stripe in this geography.

Why this is, I can’t say. Perhaps it’s the martial nature of the game echoing in the cradle of the former Confederacy. Or perhaps, as the South was left to stagnate economically in the early 20th century, its success in college football became a singular point of regional pride. Perhaps that football is game of discipline, teamwork and sacrifice of individual goals that finds favor in the so-called red states. Whatever it is, the South is remarkably free of the kind of anti-football backlash that exists in pockets around the country. There’s no perception of “the dumb jock” in SEC country. Rather, the football player is regarded with honor and awe. It’s still cool to play in high school and aspire to play in college in the South. It’s still in favor to be an unrepentant fan, whether male or female.

A Singular Victory for Integration

It’s also true that the success of the Southern game is the triumph of integration. Though hard-fought and long-delayed, Southern football has become the nation’s best version of the game because African-American athletes have been integrated into the regions’ most historic programs. It was only 1970 -- and if you’re as old as me, that doesn’t seem that long ago -- that Bear Bryant, struggling to recruit African-American players from Alabama and facing difficulty being highly ranked by the polls, made the fateful decision to invite John McKay’s integrated USC team to Legion Field in Birmingham to drub his own squad, demonstrating without political statement the need to integrate Alabama football and, by extension, the SEC.

APAlabama head coach Nick Saban

Some northern teams prospered, recruiting black players from the Deep South back then. Duffy Daugherty’s Michigan State teams in the 1960s, and Johnny Majors’ and Jackie Sherrill’s Pitt teams in the 1970s, come to mind. Think how unlikely it would be for a Pitt coach today to go to the Gulf and pluck a talent like the great Hugh Green away from Nick Saban at Alabama, Houston Nutt at Ole Miss or Les Miles at LSU. The coaches and schools in the South that had waited for Bryant have followed his example, without the need for further explanation. The cost of integration has been the eclipse of the great historically black college football programs: Grambling, Jackson State, Southern, Morgan State and others, but with all the talent gathered now at the big state universities and more people moving to the Sunbelt, this dominance of Southern football is likely to go on.

The Myth of the Coach

Names of great coaches like Bear Bryant, Shug Jordan, Bobby Dodd, Vince Dooley and, just a bit to the west, Frank Broyles and Darrell Royal, echo like the names of a pantheon of mythological gods. Even today, Saban’s success at Alabama got respected rivals Tommy Tuberville and Phil Fulmer fired at Auburn and Tennessee, respectively, sending each school looking for its own deliverer to descend from Mount Olympus.

APUSC head coach Pete Carroll

Southern schools have become such magnets for talented coaches that apart from Pete Carroll at USC (a school whose name contains the word Southern), Bob Stoops at Oklahoma (which is not really quite in the South but close) and Jim Tressel at Ohio State, is there a coach in his prime anywhere other than in the South who would bring excitement back to your favorite program? If you say Ron Zook has done good things at Illinois, is there any Gator fan who would trade Urban Meyer to get Zook back?

Given the recent sordid news coming from the state capital in South Carolina, I did ask with some sincerity where Steve Spurrier falls in the line of succession for governor. Surely it has to be ahead of the secretary of agriculture or the commissioner of weights and measures. He is, after all, a proven winner, has a long and happy marriage and is unflinchingly honest, even if that honesty is sometimes tough to swallow. And just maybe somebody needs to throw a visor at state legislators from time to time.

While he isn’t coaching in the SEC, but rather in the ACC, the man whom I think is the best college head coach in the business, Paul Johnson, plies his trade in the South. He won at Georgia Southern with kids passed over by the major schools. He won with undersized future Marines, carrier pilots and nuclear engineers at Navy. And he won last year at Georgia Tech with still more engineers and a running attack is so explosive that it looks like a passing game.

Next time: part 2 of why Southern football is superior: the stadiums, the players, tailgating and Sela Ward.

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