I missed the first quarter due to Fire/Rescue training, which I suppose demonstrates my dedication to the latter. Tonight’s National Championship College Football Game is the most important game in any sport all year; indeed, as any true Southerner knows, college football is the only actual sport played anywhere in the world.
Go Dawgs.
UPDATE: Final score 65-7. Congratulations to the back to back champions.
My beloved Frogs are getting gigged.
ReplyDeleteTCU had a great season, but I guess the real championship game was the UGA-OSU playoff contest. That one came down to the wire!
DeleteI think this championship should have an asterisk attached. Ohio with a lot of injuries to their offensive starters, came within a cat's whisker of beating Georgia in what was basically a "home game" for the Dawgs.
DeleteThe committee made a mistake by not moving Georgia/Ohio to the fiesta bowl and Michigan/TCU to the Peach bowl. Because of that, there will always be questions about What if?
I wouldn’t go as far as that, but Ohio led that game almost the whole time. They were the real competition.
DeleteStill, in the end, their fate was in their own hands — feet, rather. They blew the winning kick. That’s not on anyone but themselves. They had every chance to win, but they didn’t quite get it done.
It’s raining but because of the geometry of the stadium only TCU's side of the stadium is in the rain.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure it was salty rain pouring into the wound. Horned frogs are tough little critters - they will be back!
ReplyDeleteI was born and raised near Boston. The devotion to sport by Bostonians and New England is strong; the Red Sox are nearly as much as a cult as they are a baseball team, the Celtics have had teams where every starter and the first player off the bench are all in the Hall of Fame, the Patriots ran roughshod over the NFL for a decade and a half and the Bruins are tearing up the NHL right now. Then there's high school sports, which are inescapable.
ReplyDeleteBut for some reason college sport - with the exception of hockey - has no impact in the area whatsoever. I don't know why.
RonF, I grew up outside of Boston, and my only take (from the 1970s) is that fans in Boston are uniquely passionate about sports, and most of them hail from a blue collar background and have little interest in college sports as as result. And that this blue-collar heritage has persevered in the sports culture even as the demographic has inevitably changed toward a more college-educated, white-collar fan base. I've never seen such dedication from fans as I have from the Boston franchises. My dad used to listen to call-in sports radio from time to time. Man! These guys were crazy into it.
ReplyDeleteIt may also be that college in the South has often embraced more agricultural and working-class, and not only elite, modes of learning. The University of Georgia has excellent programs in various agricultural sciences, and for example recently developed a first-generation vaccine (meaning, a vaccine built on the most well-established practices rather than experimental ones) for honey bees that will help the survival of pollinators. It's a great school for veterinary medicine as well.
ReplyDeleteThere are plenty of the Southern schools that are similar: Alabama, Texas A&M (Agriculture & Mechanics), and so forth. They're all big land-grant institutions that aspired from the beginning to educate broadly among the citizenry, rather than to produce an elite.
You forgot Clempson Cow College. It also has a great agricultural department. Also great sports teams.
DeleteIt's not so much that I forgot them (although one can easily forget the ACC) as that I hadn't intended a comprehensive list. Georgia and Alabama are notable in that their flagship schools are of this sort, though; and Texas A&M has its own school system, one of six university systems in Texas. There are plenty of other colleges and universities in the South and West that aim at providing education and improvement to agriculture and blue collar industry, but those three stand out in prominence.
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