This is so spot on.
Not that the suits care…
- Bloviation for the Dawgnation
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Quote Of The Day
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“We remember the Sugar Bowl, I think it my junior year of high school, we let Alabama beat us twice,” Brinson said of a team that also lost to the Crimson Tide in the SEC Championship game. “We’re not letting Alabama beat us twice. In the Sugar Bowl in 2018, they… thought they should have been in the playoffs and lost to Texas.” -- AB-H, 12/27/23
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Get The Picture · Bloviation for the Dawgnation
Get The Picture 
Nailed it!
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This WVU fan gets college football more than every suit or national talking head out there.
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Do we know if this guy is a well known real estate attorney in the Charleston area?
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What a great, well-written post. It’d be funny if he was the WVU AD. lol
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Excellent post. I still have a hard time caring much about Missouri. Even when they were winning the SEC East this was true.
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Yeah, the WVU post could have been written by any SEC team about playing Missouri. Even when they were on their heater after entering the league and beat Georgia once and played us tough a few other times, who actually cared? They backed their way into the SEC East title bothy ears and ended up in the SEC Championship Game and both of those title games were mere footnotes. I’m not saying you have to have played a team 100 times to care about it, but if there’s no reason to care and you’re unlikely to cross paths more than a handful of times a year with fans of the opposition then, yeah, dude’s right. It’s like playing an Independence Bowl matchup midseason.
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Plus, bringing A$M and Mizzou into the league killed two great rivalry games that had ~100 years of history.
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I do think UT and OU entries will work very well with our existing western teams…. Mizzou needs to get away from the SEC East and they will fit better. There’s a decent chunk of Mizzou alums in the mid-south— nashville and west roughly.
Anecdotally, i have a tons of family who are Mizzou alums and they are obsessed with the SEC and want to fit in so bad. Which makes me like them more. My 83yr old aunt in St. Louise listens to Finebaum everyday, i shit you not. I’m interested to see how their presence changes when they liven up matchups with OU, A&M, TX and even LSU and the MS schools. I’ve been to the Grove when Mizzou came to town and they invaded in droves and soaked it up like someone who belongs, even if their accents didn’t fit.
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*Louis
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At their closest and quickest points, the states of Mississippi and Missouri are a 91 mile drive.
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Well, as we know…there were two competing admin bodies in the sport, the conference commissioners and the NCAA. The NCAA bowed out and abdicated to the conference commissioners, who just let money rule all. It’s a sad state of affairs nationally, IMO, even if we’re still largely intact in the SEC/ACC.
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Well said
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I cannot remember the last time I saw a person wearing a Missouri, A&M, Texas, or Oklahoma shirt in middle Georgia. Saw an Auburn t-shirt yesterday.
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I have seen A&M here but I think that is because like us they wear their team colors. I saw OU while living in Augusta but in a military town that happens.
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Because of the large military presence, you see some of everything in Augusta. It is usually ones and twos though, nowhere near enough to really generate any sort of rivalry.
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I have seen OU gear in Middle GA, but none of the others you mentioned. Although I think it is the same guy each time in Publix in Perry.
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Even when Miss St and Ole Miss both suck, that game sells out and a loss can get a coach fired. That’s a rivalry. Teams like Mizzou, WV, Kansas, Oregon St, etc etc etc deserve that and moreover we deserve that. Everyone has more good football to watch week to week when those games exist.
It’s easy to say money drives everything and it does. But what that means in terms of actually watching football is that they are chasing as many “big” matchups as possible. Ranked matchups between big brands. So you get a few more “big” Texas games every year, but who gives a shit about the game when they and, say, LSU are both having down years? Give me 2-8 Mizzou vs 1-9 Kansas over unranked LSU vs unranked Texas any day. Or unranked Texas vs unranked Nebraska or Texas Tech or Houston or some other team they actually have a history with.
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Put another way, CFB is supposed to be filled with games that matter even when they “don’t.” So, so many of those are gone.
It’s not that it “means more” in the SEC. It just STILL means more because we haven’t been ripped apart like everyone else yet.
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Interesting, isn’t it, that two games on our November schedule, Mississippi St and Kentucky, are already in our minds as potential trap games. We care about those teams and games and will follow those teams until we play them. Nobody outside the conference will care much until the weeks we play, but we will care and follow their progress from a distance as we parse our third team linebackers pursuit abilities. (Probably great. h/t recruiting) We know how much those games matter. TV won’t care, but I don’t give a flip about that. Those games matter to us. We are likely losing that and I lament that reality.
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Well put. As a kid and teenager and 20-something, I can remember the iconic matchups well that were the hallmark of Saturdays that are gone or will soon be gone. Oklahoma/Nebraska, Aggie Bonfire before the A&M/Texas game, Bedlam, Arkansas/Texas, The Backyard Brawl, Pitt/Penn State…all because of money (well, in the case of A&M/Texas, also because A&M is a psycho cult that could stand being little brother).
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10 years from now, possibly much sooner, the suits will care deeply when they see empty seats in stadiums, lower tv ratings and smaller dollar amounts coming in to athletic association coffers. The suits will immediately blame the length of games, not enough scoring, racism, sexism, gender bias and pretty much everything except the actual reason for fans loss of interest, the game of college football being fundamentally changed from what made it popular to begin with.
Words cannot express how happy I am that Georgia won a national championship before college football was ruined on the altar of tv money. I think me made it just under the wire.
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This post sums up what’s wrong about the path CFB is taking. It should be reposted across every ESPN and national sports website.
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Not that it will matter, but I just retweeted this to ESPN, The Athletic, F-baum, Herbie, Rece Davis, Fowler, Seth, Mandel and the Big 10. Won’t help but hopefully someone will read it and think briefly about the carnage they’re causing to this sport.
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I think Rece Davis is the only talking head or suit who truly gets it.
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Agreed, and he’s the only one I actually respect as a talking head. He’s a true college football fan.
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I’d probably add Chris Fowler to that.
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Damn, Bluto…the song nailed it…”they paved paradise, put up a parking lot”
Good bye Saturdays down south, hello cross country junkets
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This is also what we called bowl season. Something to watch, but no fun unless there’s some skin in the game.
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UCLA-Illinois and USC-Northwestern are going to be the new El ‘Assicos, to borrow a phrase from Spencer Hall
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Make that guy the commissioner of college football!
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Joanie sent me down a rabbit hole…
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Hopefully not to that ill-fated night when Brandee got into the Devil’s juice and recorded the very first karaoke…circa 1935
To this day, many of the fellas tip their hats to her picture every time they walk into the joint.
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I think some are hiding their face in shame.
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Man, I did not know “dirty blues” was a whole subgenre. Quite the rabbit hole. Headphones are recommended.
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Red Stick is almost too far. Starknam is far enough to travel for a football game. Columbia, MO is too far. Greater Bryan, Tejas is too far. Oklahoma is too far. Austin, Tejas is farther than Greater Bryan. SouthEASTERN conference.
It just means more!!
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So i grew up in Memphis (degree from UGA) and this has been the life of a Tiger fan since they went from independent to the birth of conference usa in 1996.
The tigers have never been more than a few flashes in the pan in football (see 2019 cotton bowl), but we’re always plenty scrappy. My childhood watching them was filled with as many as 5 SEC teams on their then-Independent schedule….. ole miss, miss state, tennessee and arkansas were regulars…. Vandy as well….. they defeated alabama and florida in the 80s…. played in Sanford stadium twice (81 and 83 i think).
Ever since they joined this crappy world of cobbled together teams chasing money, it’s been exactly like the way this WVU fan described for them. Not saying the SEC teams saw the Tigers as their real rival but it was definitely a big brother – little brother and the Tigers were fully a part of the water cooler environment that is now only an SEC thing.
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’82 and ’84, my Freshman year in Athens. I remember a defensive war that we won 13-3. Memphis had a DB named Derrick Burroughs who was great, 1st round pick in the NFL draft the next year.
Yes, knowing this inane information is unimportant in this world today, but, who cares. Everyone needs a hobby. My wife says it is an illness. But she was a tiny cheerleader out of Valwood in 1984, so what does she know? (Don’t tell her I said that.)
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Before the internet and before recruiting itself became a big business, tons of highly talented players slipped under the radar to what are now-inferior brands.
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True that. I went to high school with Benji Roland, a middle linebacker in our 4/3 defense at Dodge Co. He was ranked 35th in the state by the AJC for the ’85 class. I thought he was a lock to the good guys, but he signed with Auburn and started three years at Nose between Tracy Rocker and Ron Stallworth on some great teams. He was virtually unnoticed unless you saw him play.
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Exactly why we need a 2-division SEC, geographically defined. 9 SEC games, revolve 2 teams from the opposite division.
In CFB your biggest rivals are generally your closest neighbors.
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Regionalism’s foundation is rivalries. Rivalries only form in close geographical proximity to each other. There’s a reason there are only a few true rivalries in the NFL, MLB, and NBA. Those teams are too far apart to become rivals. Super conferences will have the same problem. The TV suits are hoping they can convert regional passion into more lucrative national brands to make up for lost rivalries/regionalism. I doubt it will work and it will destroy my favorite sport in the process.
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