“This happens every Saturday?” my father asked just before noon yesterday, with equal parts concern and curiosity. I was home in Missouri, college-football country, and we were watching Lee Corso, a seventy-eight-year-old man, pick up a life-size elephant mask, put it on his head, and begin twirling his newfound trunk around like a rancher moments from roping a stray calf. This was national television: ESPN’s College GameDay, live from Auburn, Alabama, which was hosting the Iron Bowl—an annual football game between Auburn and Alabama, the fiercest college rivalry in the country, without much close competition. This year’s game had taken on increased significance because both teams were playing for a spot in the SEC title game, and possibly the national championship. It was college-football fervor instensified, but only by a matter of degrees. This game, we were told by ESPN, whose anchors could teach P. T. Barnum a thing or two about hyping, was the season’s biggest—bigger than every other game this year, stretching back to September, that they had described that way already.
Seven hours later, one of the most improbable games in recent memory had been completed, and everything around it had cemented college football as perhaps our most insane cultural institution. Among the handful of good reasons to make a point of watching live sports is the hope of seeing something you’ve never seen before; that happens only rarely, but this game, which Auburn won, 34-28, provided perhaps the most remarkable sequence in recent major sports memory. Here’s what happened in the final minute alone: An Auburn touchdown that perhaps shouldn’t have been; An Alabama player landing out of bounds with, at most, one-fifth of a second left to play; A subsequent fifty-seven-yard field goal attempt, by Alabama, which landed short and in the arms of a player from Auburn, who returned it a hundred and nine yards for a game-winning touchdown. Everyone immediately agreed that they’d never seen anything like it, and within minutes, so many undergraduates rushed from the stands that you couldn’t see the field at all.
College football has insanity at its heart and, really, throughout its body. It involves a game that is becoming increasingly questionable to play, a system of negligibly compensated labor that appears to be crumbling, a means for crowning a champion that makes minimal logical sense, and fans who behave like heathens, even by the already debased standard set by sports fans at large.
If I can make one recommendation for your Monday, which might help make sense of why and how college football, and this particular game, mean so much, tune into the Paul Finebaum Show, which I wrote about last year. Finebaum’s show, which is now streamed live by ESPN, is among the most popular in the country, and orbits, for three hundred and sixty-four days, around Thanksgiving Saturday. Finebaum has already declared yesterday’s to be the greatest Iron Bowl in history, a statement that has the virtue of probably being true, but also that serves the purposes of a radio host hoping to sit back and let his callers do the work. The show will offer a tour of some of humanity’s worst emotions: gloating (Tammy, the show’s rowdiest Auburn fan, will be nearly unbearable), jealousy (I can hear Jim from Tuscaloosa now), Schaudenfreude (Darryl from Georgia, with no dog in the fight, will almost certainly come down hard on Alabama fans), panic (pick a Crimson Tide fan—they’ll be upset with Nick Saban’s decision-making, having briefly forgotten the fact that he’s won three national titles in four seasons), and anger. On that front, we have not heard much of late from Harvey Updyke, the man who was so mad the last time the Tigers beat Alabama that he poisoned two trees on Auburn’s campus and called Finebaum’s show to tell everyone, but Saturday might be enough to bring him back to the airwaves.
Many inappropriate metaphors are tossed around to describe the importance of college football in the state and the intensity of this rivalry; pick your warring ethnic groups, and they have been used to describe Alabama and Auburn fans, living together in the same state. From the outside, this all can appear, well, insane—a distraction from the state’s many economic and social problems. One question I attempted to answer while in Alabama is whether or not the state’s obsession with football was a positive or a negative: Did the attention placed on a game enhance life in the state, or simply help its citizens gloss over issues that might be worth confronting? (Charles Barkley, an Auburn Tiger who appeared next to Corso on TV yesterday, has summed up the state’s woes by noting, “We are number forty-eight in everything and Arkansas and Mississippi aren’t going anywhere.”) In equal measure, historians have been able to find ways to connect nearly every one of the state’s advances, including desegregation, to the success of its football teams. But football is at best a catalyst, not a solution.
Then there is the fact that, like any one person or institution, the state is rightly proud of the thing in which it is most successful. After the game, Auburn’s athletic director declared that, if his team wins next week’s S.E.C. championship, against Missouri, it would be “a disservice to the nation” were Auburn to be left out of the national championship. (Barring losses, Florida State and Ohio State seem likely to face off in that game.) It’s a ridiculous sentiment, but one I sympathize with: there is no other moment, save for regularly scheduled football games and unscheduled tragedies, like the tornados that struck Tuscaloosa in 2011, when the state of Alabama has the attention of their three hundred and nine million fellow Americans. Who are we, in parts of the country with professional sports to cheer and (relatively) thriving economies to enjoy, to deny Alabamans a bit of crowing?
After the Iron Bowl, I went to visit several longtime friends, a husband and wife, both graduates of the University of Missouri, who were watching their Tigers attempt to secure a berth in the S.E.C. championship with a win over Texas A. & M. When Missouri scored a go-ahead touchdown in the fourth quarter, the female half of the couple, who I have previously seen so bored by sporting events that she’s fallen asleep, jumped off the couch and screamed “Yes!” so many times, and so loudly, that it took every ounce of restraint for me not to ask her husband the last time she had been so ecstatic in his presence.
In any event, the point is that college-football insanity may be most intense in Alabama, but it’s a virus that spreads, with no vaccine in sight. A season of surprising success for her football team had driven my friend into a fit of madness. At this point, she cares about little else. The couple has already bought tickets to fly to Atlanta, for the S.E.C. Championship. As I was leaving their house, she pulled up a travel Web site to find out how much it would cost to get to California for the national championship.
Photograph by Kevin C. Cox/Getty.