James "Jimmy" Littlebottom IV had just paid $394.37 to take his family, for the first time in any of their lives, to attend a Texas Longhorns football game.
That accounted for roughly 220 bucks to get in the door, with his wife (Sarah) and two kids (Jimmy Five and Kaeleigh), another 65 for nachos, drinks, and some kind of meat stuffed into three other kinds of meat, 75 for hats and shirts (immediately baptized by nacho cheese), and 20 just for the privilege of parking four miles away in a lot owned by a man happily nicknamed Shifty. Plus tax.
In the offseason (or during the season, or during games, or pretty much whenever I have a free two seconds) one of the things that I find myself doing to keep sane is to revisit my favorite Ohio State football moments, and specifically my favorite Ohio State/Michigan moments. I've only attended two The Games in person; 2004, in which a Buckeye team finally got their act together and beat the crap out of a heavily favored Mike Hart and company, and 2006, which was incredible but would be a lot more fun in retrospect had Ohio State not shit the bed right after.
Both 2004 and 2006 had iconic, rivalry defining moments, but what's funny to me is that if I'm being really, really, really honest with myself, I'm not sure that I enjoyed watching those moments in person as much as I enjoyed watching Ohio State and Michigan get into a fight and Marcus Hall giving the double bird to the entirety of Michigan Stadium on live television.
Jimmy wasn't a man of means, and the year and a half he had spent saving up the money and kissing ass at work to get a weekend off had culminated in Texas losing, embarrassingly, to a school founded by perverts and cretins known as the University of Mississippi. "Ha ha hell yeah!" screamed the lone opposing fan in his section before letting loose multiple blasts from a conch.
I love that moment because it is perfectly emblematic of how teams in the Big Ten have historically felt about each other. There are rivalries on top of rivalries, a giant pile of weird trophies and generational resentments all wrapped up in a beautifully passive-aggressive bow. I would be shocked, and probably a little annoyed, if a fan from another Big Ten team told me that they were rooting for Ohio State to win some big game (with the exception that it wasn't that they were rooting for the Buckeyes to beat their own rivals, out of pure spite. That I'll allow).
Anyway, this is a roundabout way of saying that the SEC has a chance to be extremely funny this season.
Jimmy was already out three bills and upset about the loss, but normally that would've been bearable. He'd absorbed worse financial hits and dumber Texas losses before. Then it happened. The gloating Ole Miss fan made the familiar "Go Horns" symbol, extending his forefinger and pinky while concealing the middle two fingers with his thumb, in the shape of the Longhorn logo Jimmy loved so very much.
For a long time, the SEC has presented the conference as kind of a united front, in that they'd endorse (or at least tolerate) the idea that all teams get to share in the success of the conference. Vanderbilt might not be winning any bowl games, but they get to glom on to some small measure of pride watching Alabama win national championships.
That's asinine, but also understandable for a conference and culture looking for ways to differentiate themselves from the college football version of Saturn Devouring His Son up north.
And now they can't do that! Because now Texas and Oklahoma are coming in, and the bonds tie the SEC schools together are going to be strained by two blue-blood programs kicking down the door, tracking mud into the parlor, and demanding that you pretend to care about a stupid wagon and not make fun of their very extremely cool hand signal.
Jimmy momentarily relaxed at the familiar gesture, reminding him as it did of grandma's apple pie, summers relaxing at the nearby fishing hole, and miles and miles and miles of hot, barren chaparral that an entire ass state had convinced itself was livable.
And look, don't get me wrong: the rivalries and individual pettiness seen in the SEC is right up there with anything else seen on this planet. I'm sure they're prepared to make fans of the Sooners and Longhorns completely miserable; hell, I'm counting on it. I love that the conference is being forced to clarify if a hand signal constitutes "taunting" months before a game has been played. It's even funnier because I don't think that Texas fans really care about it all that much in the first place, Jimmy Littlebottom IV notwithstanding.
But this isn't a home-and-home nonconference series. They're all in the same barrel of snakes, together forever (or until the next round of realignment). The addition of two of the biggest programs to an already stacked conference is something that I don't think has an equal in college football history. It's a lot of teams jockeying for a finite amount of attention and prestige, and while the schools entered into this agreement expecting a mutually beneficial money-printing enterprise, who knows if even an expanded College Football Playoff keeps everybody happy forever.
But then the horns, which had previously been turned up, were now turned downward, to the ground, to hell, as the fan gleefully shouted "Horns down! HORNS DOWN!" The rage that boiled up inside Jimmy at the blatant disrespect shown to his most hallowed of hand symbols could not be contained.
The rejoinder to this is that the Big Ten, if Oregon can sustain their recent run of success and USC can pull themselves out of the mud, has done the same thing to themselves.
I kind of hope so! The fear that the consolidation of these programs into super conferences would turn everything about college football into a beige slurry is well-founded, but what if it did the exact opposite?
What if all the Big Ten and the SEC did was to put a bunch of angry raccoons in a burlap sack? Wouldn't that kick ass?
He saw naught but burnt orange, and summoning the spirits of Sam Houston, Nolan Ryan, and Pecos Bill, Jimmy launched himself at the offending fan, soaring through that Texas sky and landing himself into the hearts of all that witnessed the event.
It was the greatest moment of his life.
