| | Another week has passed and it is time once again to consider a pressing question facing college football. This week's inquiry comes to us from Rusty Gunn, a law partner of my old friend and college roommate, Pete Allen. (By the way, I feel somewhat odd introducing questions offered by others; as the father of a small child, I feel like Elmo on "Sesame Street," announcing that Dorothy the goldfish has a question before going over to the window to ask Mr. Noodle, whose lack of intellectual capacity suggests that he may hold advanced degrees from Auburn University.)
Rusty's question is this:
What school has the best fans?
Naturally, I will confine my response to the Southeastern Conference. I hear good things about Nebraska fans and I have a passing acquaintance with Oklahoma fans, but the fans with whom I genuinely am familiar are in the S.E.C.
While I think quite highly of the Georgia fan base, I cannot conscientiously claim that the denizens of Bulldog Nation are the league's best boosters. In fact, I wrote a column in The Red & Black a decade or so ago criticizing my fellow Georgia fans for failing to live up to their full potential. The student section was never full until late in the first quarter and we tended to remain quietly in our seats until third down came around.
That situation has improved considerably since the arrival of Mark Richt in Athens; the Dawg Walk, the Lone Bugler, and the opening scoreboard montage all have helped to get the Bulldog faithful in the stands early and on their feet often. Even so, though, we still have a ways to go before Sanford Stadium is as feared a venue for visiting teams as the stadia in Auburn, Baton Rouge, Gainesville, and Knoxville.
I would have to rate Georgia fans the third-best in the Southeastern Conference, behind the second-place Tennessee fans and the top-ranked Alabama faithful. Perhaps not coincidentally, the three S.E.C. schools with the top three fan bases also are the three S.E.C. schools with the top three programs all-time.
The Crimson Tide fans I have known manage to be rabid and easygoing at the same time, committed to their team but cordial to the opposition. I know a lot of Georgia fans who don't like Tennessee people, but I have never encountered a Volunteer fan who wasn't a decent fellow. No major Bulldog rival has a fan base of whom I think more highly than the Big Orange.
The nod for fourth place has to go to Ole Miss fans. The sad fact of University of Mississippi athletics is that the Rebel football team has seldom been worthy of its fan base. The best place in the country to conduct your pre-game preparatory exercises and rituals, bar none, is the grove. (I use the phrase "pre-game preparatory exercises and rituals" rather than the more common, and shorter, term "tailgating" because a person who tailgates is, by definition, a tailgater and I, for one, am no kind of 'gater. For the same reason, although my law practice sometimes involves appearing in court, I do not describe myself as a litigator.)
The S.E.C.'s fifth-best fans are the boosters of the Arkansas Razorbacks. The price for rooting for the Hogs is high. For one thing, Arkansas fans usually have to live in Arkansas, which is nicknamed "the Natural State." If you're familiar at all with Enlightenment political philosophy, you know that life in the Natural State is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. For another thing, Arkansas "home" games can take place just about anywhere in the state, giving rise to much confusion.
Perhaps most awful of all is the fact that Razorback fans are required to wear those horrid hog hats and shout things like, "Woo! Pig! Sooey!" On Saturday afternoons in the fall, I stand up with over 90,000 other people while we all bark like dogs, but even I would feel silly doing the Arkansas cheer. If a fellow could put up with all that yet still root for his team, he deserves to be ranked in the top half of the league for having a quality fan base.
In answering the question, "What school has the best fans?", of course, we also must consider which school has the worst fans. In defining "worst," I am considering two factors: arrogance and apathy. A lack of team spirit costs you points, but so does an inability to express your team spirit in any way that is not obnoxious.
In terms of apathy, no team in the S.E.C. takes a back seat to Vanderbilt. The Commodores are incapable of filling up the smallest stadium in the conference and the level of indifference demonstrated by their fans truly is remarkable. Kentucky's and Mississippi State's football teams are almost as bad as Vanderbilt's, but at least their fans show some signs of caring. Because I like Tubby Smith and I don't like the fact that M.S.U. copied our nickname, I'm ranking Kentucky fans sixth and Mississippi State fans seventh.
There is, though, something worse than being apathetic and that is being a jerk. In the last fifteen years or so, there has been a race to the bottom by the fans of schools trying to outdo one another for the S.E.C.'s worst O.Q. (obnoxiousness quotient).
South Carolina fans, who were always impassioned about their lackluster tradition, won a couple of lousy ball games here and there, then, boom!---their egos became as inflated as their bellies. (If the question had been, "What school has the S.E.C.'s fattest fans?", the Gamecock faithful would win the prize, hands down. Pound for pound, no fan base packs more pounds than South Carolina's.) Starting around the time Steve Taneyhill began reviving the mullet as a popular haircut in Columbia, S.C., the Gamecocks' boosters have gone from being mildly annoying to being absolutely (and largely baselessly) insufferable.
The same thing happened, albeit with much better cause, to the fans in Gainesville, Fla., and Baton Rouge, La. During the days of Mike Archer and Charley Pell, of Curley Hallman and Galen Hall, of Gerry DiNardo and Gary Darnell, you seldom heard a cross word out of the Tiger and Gator faithful. Then along came Steve Spurrier and Nick Saban; they say a fish rots from the head down and, when it comes to cockiness in sports, they're right: Florida fans and L.S.U. fans quickly allowed their respective coaches' confidence to fuel their arrogance.
Two illustrative examples---two of many, many examples---will suffice. A Gator backer leaned out of the window of a moving car and shouted, "Gators for Goff! Four more years for Ray Goff!" at me in Jacksonville in 1993. A Bayou Bengal booster who came up to me outside of Sanford Stadium on the way in to last year's Georgia-Louisiana State game said, "I hear y'all have some guy named David Greene. Who's he? I hear y'all have some guy named Mark Richt. Who's he?" (Unfortunately, I wasn't able to locate that guy after the Bulldogs pounded the Tigers, 45-16. If I had been able to find him, I would have asked him the same question Eddie Murphy asked the bartender in "48 Hrs.": "Heard of him now, man?")
Florida fans, between 1990 and 1991, and Louisiana State fans, between 2003 and 2004, went from zero to obnoxious in a great big hurry. After the way the Gator faithful behaved themselves in the Classic City in 1995, I became an ardent supporter of keeping the game in Jacksonville because I didn't want to invite those people back to Athens for another 63 years.
I never had a problem with Tiger fans before, but I was astonished not only at how intolerable they became, but at how angry they were. I have never in my life heard a team so bitterly vitriolic about being cheated out of the national title . . . in a year in which they won the national title. I guess that's just the way it geauxs, theaux.
By the end of the 1996 season, it seemed that every Florida fan had adopted Steve Spurrier's personality and, by the end of the 2003 campaign, it was as though every L.S.U. fan was trance-channelling James Carville. Fortunately, the Bengal Tigers have backed off a bit since then, so, in ranking the S.E.C.'s worst fans, I judge Vanderbilt's to be the fifth-worst, South Carolina's to be the fourth-worst, L.S.U.'s to be the third-worst, and Florida's to be the second-worst.
And then there's Auburn.
Auburn's fans are in a class by themselves.
Actually, allow me to rephrase that. Auburn's fans are in a lack of class by themselves.
There is nothing about Auburn that is not wholly, utterly, entirely, and absolutely obnoxious. Their color scheme is obnoxious. Their fans are obnoxious. Their players are obnoxious. Their coaches are obnoxious. For crying out loud, their band is obnoxious.
As evidenced by its N.C.A.A. rap sheet, Auburn University had established itself as the S.E.C.'s least reputable member institution well before the Terry Bowden revelations and the Tommy Tuberville near-firing. Virtually everyone ever to have supported the miscreants from the Ugliest Village has been sneering, snide, condescending, or worse. I literally do not believe I have ever heard an Auburn fan utter so much as a single sentence in Athens that was not rude.
There's a word that captures perfectly what it means to be an Auburn fan. This is a family-friendly weblog, so I won't use the word, but I will give you a hint:
I don't think it's coincidental that Auburn fans celebrate their victories using toilet paper.
That's my take on the quality of football fans in the Southeastern Conference. Next week, we will return once again to the issue of coaching changes, only, this time, we will not concern ourselves with a coaching change that has happened, but rather with a coaching change that should happen. Stay tuned.
Go 'Dawgs! |
