Speak for yourself, born and raised in Alabama, and I hate ever being tied to any of the civil war crap. South lost its honor by taking arms against its own country. Not to get off on that tangent but lets keep football in perspective.To me the southern thing has zero to do with that era, it has to do with being a gentleman, and loving the outdoors and especially college football. That is the only southern thing I want anything to do with. So not to get all high and mighty, but do not group all southerners in a broad group.Thanks and Roll Tide, the true pride of the south is Bama football to me. I love the greeting I get when I travel and folks see the scriptA logo and holler roll tide with a midwestern or yankee accent, it is just to cool.
Well, I was about half kidding but you perhaps haven't been here long enough to know that, so that's my fault.
However......the Civil War ended in 1865. The first cfb game was played in November of 1869 between Princeton and Rutgers.
"On November 13, 1869, Princeton and Rutgers had a return match, which Princeton won. In its origins, Princeton was very much a college of the South. Cavalier families sent their sons there, and Old Nassau proudly turned up its nose at the codfish aristocracy of Harvard. So when the Princeton football team utilized the Confederate yell, well known as to those young men as the 'scarer' that the rebels had used in charging the Union forces only a few years before, a new-old form of verbal encouragement became a collegiate tradition for the players. Actually, Princeton had used the rebel yell in the historic first game against Rutgers, but cool heads observed that it winded the players so much that they lost the game. When Princeton came back for the second match, the same cool heads lined up shouters on the sidelines to do the yelling while the players concentrated on winning the game.
Thus, was cheerleading born, thanks to the Confederacy. Starting in 1877, the first schools in the South to play football were Washington and Lee University and Virginia Military Institute...."
(John MacCallum, "Southeastern Conference Football: America's Most Competitive Conference," 1980:15).
The late Southern humorist Lewis Grizzard summarized his feelings in 1992 in his book, "I Haven't Understood Anything Since 1962." I'm paraphrasing but here, in essence, is what he said:
College football has so much more than the pro game. A Southern white friend of mine explained why it seems so many Southern men take a life and death approach. He said that if you'll think about it, except for Vietnam (which was like getting tied by Wake Forest), the Southern white male is the only American to ever lose a war. That shame has been handed down from generation to generation - that and all the Northerners thinking we're all a bunch of Jed Clampetts. So a Northerner moves down South and his neighbor communicates it's a shame there's not still a war going on else he could go get his gun and shoot the Yankee. No, there's no war going on - but what there is is college football.
Now - is this to be taken overly literally? No. But is there an element of truth to it? Yes.
The South was agrarian at the time and in ruins still. The first cfb game in the South was in 1877, a time when Reconstruction was just sort of coming to an end. The first game in the Southeast was held at the University of Kentucky in April of 1880 (and that's stretching the definition of SE right there). By 1895, nine of the ten member schools of the SEC in 1980 were playing college football, which had very little in common with what we have now but was more like rugby.
So while my statement shouldn't be taken overly literally, there ARE some elements of truth to it.
