Thursday, July 9, 2009

Why we chant SEC! SEC! SEC! And you are The Rust Belt


A response to Luke @ Eleven Warriors, please give it a read.

Why do we chant "SEC"? In a word, pride. Pride in the level of competition. Pride in knowing our conference champ whipped your conference champ. No team in the country wants to beat Gainesville more than the Georgia Bulldogs. But I will be damned if I want some Big10 or Big12 team beating my conference champion in the MNC game, or any other for that matter. It does not surprise me a fan in Ohio does not understand this.

It also comes not as a shock our pioneering kinfolk, long since having left our beloved South to liberate the Big12 frontier, share our passionate support for their conferences’ athletic prowess. To state that the Big12 wants to dethrone the SEC is only stating the Big12 is ambitious, an admirable trait of most Americans. For an Ohioan to take offense is further evidence of the apathy that leads one’s region to be known as the rust belt.

Should it be expected, that from the land of Dennis Kucinich, a football blogger would talk of “narrow minded, xenophobic, regional fervor”. How about this jewel: “At the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if your conference hasn’t won a Rose Bowl in a decade or if they even have a BCS tie-in at all: a football’s a football flying at 30,000 feet and there are some 1500 unplayed games without predetermine outcomes still to transpire.”

My guess is fans of the Buckeye reserve pride for the regular season, for the Michigan game, or maybe the Toledo game. After reading Luke’s blog, I have a much greater understanding of the Big10’s desire to have their champion play in the Rose Bowl and the desire to play a Pac10 team in that Rose Bowl. For Luke, having to play a Big12 or SEC team in a bowl game is unlike the 1500 games without predetermined outcomes. Yes, in Lukes eyes, those outcomes, as if ordained by God, have already been decided.

We may be a tad fanatical to look upon the SEC Championship game as a National Semifinal. Surely, something must be wrong with me, a Georgia man without a national football title in the last 28 years. How can I have higher expectations, more pride, than a Buckeye blogger with multiple conference titles and a national championship in the current decade? This is an evolutionary question for which I have no answer.

The one thing I can assure Luke, be it the BCS Title game, the Sugar Bowl, Captial One, Outback, or any other field of play, when time has expired and the Bulldogs have emerged triumphant, at some point the chant will begin. SEC! SEC! SEC!

8 comments:

bup bup bup said...

i have pride for the team i root for. i enjoy it when my conference does well, but i know in my heart of hearts that rooting for a conference as a whole is nothing but a cop out so that i don't have to acknowledge the shortcomings of the team i root for.

you're right, georgia hasn't won a NC in 28 years. and if it really is a program worthy of national respect that you undoubtedly hope it is, you should be PISSED. saying that you have higher expectations than OSU fans is laughable; we fired one of the most successful coaches of the 90's because A) he couldn't beat our rival and B) he couldn't seal the deal on a NC. we then hired a guy who did both. what we DIDN'T do is spend the 90's gleefully cheering as the Big 10 took the rest of the country to the woodshed. because we knew OSU could do better.

our expectations, EVERY YEAR, are to win a NC and beat michigan. your expectations are to hope one of 12 teams win the NC. way to go out on a limb.

if you REALLY had high expectations for your team, you'd take a long hard look at your team and stop making excuses like "but the SEC is so TOUGH!" a NC doesn't split 12 ways. win one for your own, and then maybe we'll talk about pride.

MikeInValdosta said...

We fired a very successful coach for not beating our main rivalSSSS. We do not accept mediocrity; we strive for championships and have come up short. We do not seek to lower expectation or pencil the MAC and Ohio Valley.

Our expectation is not to hop that our conference wins, but if we cannot win, better to be from our conference, than to have our conference embarrassed in the NC game so regularly as to become a national joke.

We take no pleasure in finishing second, or worse, but there is a level of pride in knowing we are playing against the best, and not some watered down conference that recruits the leftovers from our region.

I still haven't been able to find the first excuse I made, or is your post some chest clearing therapy to deal with your inferiority complex.

Good luck w/Toledo and Miami of Ohio. I look forward to the day you guys are man enough to play Cincy!

bup bup bup said...

you're not getting it. i don't have an inferiority complex because how the Big 10 does doesn't reflect at ALL how i feel about OSU football. how OSU football performs reflects how i feel about OSU football.

when georgia loses, if you actually had high expectations for your team, you should be pissed that you lost to any team, not content with "a level of pride in knowing we are playing against the best." YOU LOST. there is no pride in losing, not for a team like georgia.

also the schedule BS you keep throwing out is hilarious. OSU has scheduled home and aways with USC, miami, virginia tech, oklahoma and tennessee.

even ignoring that, among the vaunted powers georgia has scheduled in the past three years includes: western kentucky, UAB, western carolina, troy, georgia southern, and central michigan. but at least this year you guys went out on a limb and scheduled oklahoma state again... along with tennessee tech, of course.

but you're right. when georgia inevitably loses 2-4 games that it shouldn't, it's only a few weeks till bowl season and you can wipe away that failure with even more chants of SEC! SEC! SEC!

...and repeat it all over again next year, just like you've done for the last 28.

MikeInValdosta said...

What on earth makes you think I do not get pissed when my team loses? Where are you getting that?

When we lose, I take great consolation in getting to cleanse my New Year’s Day hangover by watching the Dawgs pummel a Big10 opponent in sunny Florida. Ask Herbstreit how it felt in 93.

Furthermore, if you will read the posting in reference you will understand my comments. Also, try taking in a SEC conference game someday, I do not think you will come away thinking any SEC fan is down with losing just as long as a conference member wins the national championship.

And seriously, does playing SoCal compensate for Navy, Toledo, Illinois, Indiana, Purdue, Minnesota, & New Mexico St? That’s the toughest schedule you guys have played in years. I bet it is the toughest of Tressel’s tenure.

Bottom line, if the chant of SEC is taken as a taunt meant to humiliate you, I am sorry at least when we lose, we do not cry about how the other team’s fans cheer.

bup bup bup said...

i'm going to ignore the more idiotic comments you've made here and address one thing: i understand you get pissed when georgia loses. but the fact that you allow yourself to take some sort of "pride" that you "lost to the best" shows to me (and everyone outside of the SEC) that losing is okay on a team by team basis as long as you guys have a good bowl record. which is fine if you're a winner in the SEC, like florida. but if you're georgia, constantly losing when you shouldn't and never truly being an elite team... well, that's a little pathetic.

in the 11W thread you mentioned woody hayes and what he'd say. here's a quote from the man himself:

"without winners, there wouldn't even be any civilization."

THAT is how much emphasis he, OSU, and OSU fans place on winning. not big 10 winning, not michigan winning, but OHIO STATE winning. sorry that georgia fans don't. again, maybe if you win a NC at some point in the future, or are even in the NC picture at some point you'll see what i'm talking about. until then, keep on clinging to that warm comfort blanket known as "conference pride." peace out buddy. go bucks.

AuditDawg said...

Ah, another point on which we disagree, Mike. I don't get the whole chest-thumping "SEC" chants at all. I don't care who they were playing, no way in hell am I rooting for Florida to win a national title just because they're from the SEC. I want them to lose by 50 points. I want them to lose 12 games a year. I don't care if it makes the conference look bad.

I don't root for the Mets or Phillies to win the World Series because the Braves are out of it. I don't root for the Bucs or the Panthers to win the Super Bowl because the Falcons are out of it. This is honestly one of those things that has evolved over the last few years, but I have to agree with the guys at Eleven Warriors. Who cares about conference superiority? I just want my team to win and its rivals to lose.

MikeInValdosta said...

I understand what you are saying, Audit. First of all, I was responding to a complaint about SEC chanting after beating non-SEC teams. My sub-par effort was to explain why it happens, not to say Florida winning is any consolation to a Georgia fan. I, on many occasions, have chanted SEC after beating a NCS conference team. It really had nothing to do with the non-participating teams. Simply an explanation of why LSU or Florida fans have chanted SEC after winning a title game.

I couldn't agree with you more about the pro sports. I have heard all the arguments about UF winning a title makes recruiting against them harder and all that. I root for Tech to go 0-12 every year.

As long as the MNC has pageantry judging as a component, I will continue to root for all SEC teams outside of conference. As for agreeing w/the guys at 11w, my Dawg turns its nose up to sour grapes.

Unknown said...

first of all who has OSU played from the Ohiop Valley conference? and what's wrong about scheduling a big fish like USC, Texas, Miami, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Va. Tech in home and homes like we have been and plan to do for the future......We played Cincinnati in 2006 and play them next year (or the year after I forget)...before you go dissing THE OUT OF CONFERENCE schedule for Ohio State look to the SEC where Florida doesn't leave the state for an out of conference game and plays Charleston State, Troy, etc......

As for the conference slate I cannot argue that the SEC and Big 12 are the two best conferences in football....if you watched college football for more than the last 3 years you'd know CFB is a cycle and conferences constantly rotate eras of on and off years....yes before some of the big game flops of late from the B10 we were very well respected as a hard nosed tough conference, maybe even the best in the nation and before the MNC against Florida many believed the Big ten was better than the SEC....enjoy your pride now as your conference could be the one flopping in big games in a few years.....please you can have conference pride but root for your bulldogs-I WOULD NEVER ROOT FOR THOSE WOLVERINES ON ANY CIRCUMSTANCE and for you to say you root for the Gators whether they play the Buckeyes, Hokies, Trojans, or Sooners, etc is absolutely ridiculous....I would do anything to keep Michigan from winning a MNC