Are SEC Fans the Nation’s Most Ignorant, Arrogant, and Obnoxious?

This is being written primarily to help those outside the SEC to see us in a different light.

So let’s face it SEC, Nation, to a degree that I wish we were not, I’m afraid that this is the way many conferences view us.

I can confidently say that while the vast majority of us are none of the three, from what I’ve heard and read, it definitely seems that much of the rest of the nation does see us this way. 

This is primarily because of those who fit the above three traits are broadcasting these qualities so often and so loud.

Moving to Chicago at age 20 in 1955, after living my first 20years in Alabama, as I finally came to see it for much of the South, I realized that many Southerners were still, and some still are, fighting the Civil War.

But for me, even as a child, it never had anything to do with my not liking that the old Southern way of life having been destroyed.  It was wrong from the beginning and had to be knocked flat on its butt.  My fighting was only defending the SEC and in particular, the Crimson Tide.     

While living in Chicago from 1955 to 1969, and in Nebraska in the early and late 90’s, while I would have never considered myself as having any of these three qualities, my fanatical boasting about the SEC and Bama was probably seen as being arrogant and obnoxious. 

But all anyone would ever need to do is spend enough time among the well-behaved Crimson Tide people to see how fanatical most of us are, but void of being ignorant, arrogant and obnoxious.

There is definitely something infectious about the Tide atmosphere, and especially so in Tuscaloosa.  I know many of our faculty who became bigger fans of Bama than they ever were of the university where they received their degrees.  And I also know of other Bama alumni who still remain very loyal to the Tide, wherever they may eventually live. 

This fanaticism is as true in Mississippi as much as it is in Alabama, two states that will probably never have an NFL team. Nothing could ever be as important as the intrastate rivalries both of us have.  The changing Pro teams we tend to pull for are those who have players who played at our universities.

When Virginia came within one vote of making slavery illegal before the war began, should that have happened, maybe it could have been the motivating factor for the remainder of the Confederacy, which, along with slavery, was also the last place on earth where “chivalry and their fair maidens” still existed. 

Both lifestyles were doomed, but it’s unfortunate that all of this could not have had a far more peaceful ending, which for so many years, resulted in the South becoming a nation unto itself, and for some people, unfortunately, still is.

There are few Southerners left who could possibly remember anything about Alabama’s victory over Washington in the 1926 Rose Bowl Game, but there is a good recorded history and movie about this. 

It was the first “victory” the South had experienced after the Civil War ended.

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