The Southern Game

By Charlie Barnes

It is said that history is written by the winners. Therefore, it is written that the first football game was played in New Jersey between Rutgers and Princeton four years after the end of the Civil War.

That first "season" was to consist of three games between those two teams, however the third game was cancelled because professors from both colleges complained about football's disputative effect on academics.

Such is Google's long reach that they have retroactively awarded the first college football National Co-Championships to both Princeton and Rutgers on the basis that each team won one of the first two games constituting the entirety of that first season in 1869. ESPN proclaimed 2019 the 150th year of football.

But the real origins of the game may be found earlier, and further south of New Jersey. A wonderfully entertaining but obscure book called Detailed Minutiae of Soldier Life in the Army of Northern Virginia by Carlton McCarthy, first published in 1882, recounts that Confederate soldiers enjoyed playing football to relieve the boredom of camp life.

Lonely and far from home, Yankee soldiers enjoyed playing baseball. The claim that Union General Abner Doubleday invented baseball is sketchy, but there's no doubt his game was the most popular pastime among his boys in blue.

The Confederates were a somewhat different breed. Many were descendants of the 17th Century Scots-Irish immigrants who poured into the original colonies, then across the mountains and on to the frontiers.

Former Secretary of the Navy James Webb's 2004 book Born Fighting, explores the history of this large ethnic group, which populated the south, and whose "cultural identity of acute individualism and military tradition" defined the southern soldiers and most all of their leaders.

One example of what historians call this "Celtic war mentality" manifested itself when bored Confederate soldiers in winter encampments organized themselves into companies and battalions and happily engaged in snowball "wars," maneuvering around each other as if on the battlefield. After the winter passed and before the next campaign began, they played football.

College football has been embedded in the soul of southerners and southern culture since the 19th Century. And in the lexicon of the game - air assault, ground attack, blitz, in the trenches, field general, throw the bomb - you'll hear echoes of the militaristic origins of football.

One more whimsical but enormously entertaining book puts our southern obsession with football more succinctly. Marlyn Schwartz's delicious work, A Southern Bell Primer breezily explains it this way: "Ask Southerners what the most popular religions are in the South and they are quick to tell you - Baptist, Methodist, and football. Southern women have a ready answer for this obsession with the gridiron. They say Southern men lost The War and they are determined not to lose anything ever again."

Well, maybe. Until the end of World War II, teams from the north, the midwest and the west coast seemed to dominate, not the southerners. At least that was the appearance. The south was rural and sparsely populated, and the vast majority of sportswriters were located in the large metropolitan areas from New York through the Big Ten corridor and out to Los Angeles.

Considerable measures of humility and self-examination were required for the south to eventually take its rightful place at the head of the college football banquet table.

A persistent legend surrounding the Crimson Tide vs. Southern Cal game to open the 1970 season may be apocryphal, but without question one outcome was that Bear Bryant no longer felt constrained from recruiting African-American athletes to his team.

No one can know what's in a man's heart, and it's unlikely Bryant would deliberately plan to lose a game. It is entirely reasonable to think scheduling a series against the jewel of the California coast would serve to further magnify Alabama's profile. But neither is there any doubt that Bryant was a master of thinking in terms of the long game.

Except for one recruit, ineligible under NCAA rules to play as a freshman, Alabama was still an all-white team in 1970. The Trojans featured a cadre of talented African-American players, including their starting quarterback, fullback and tailback. In fact, USC was the first fully integrated college football team to play in the state of Alabama.

Some writers have called it the game that changed football forever in the south. On that hot Saturday night in 1970, USC pulled their starters in the third quarter and still cruised to a 42-21 win. Trojan sophomore fullback Sam Cunningham got his first start that night, running for 135 yards and 2 touchdowns on only 12 carries.

Of course, black kids in the south had been playing championship football all along, just not on white teams. More than anything, southern football fans want their teams to win and so things began to change quickly.

According to Google, 24 college football programs won national championships between 1869 through the end of World War II (1945). Of these, the Yale Bulldogs won an astonishing 18 titles, the last one coming in 1927. Princeton followed with 15 championships. Harvard is third with eight titles, followed by Michigan (7), Notre Dame (5) and Minnesota (5).

Among those 24 pre-1945 programs, only four from the south had been awarded national championships (Alabama already had three by 1930; Texas A&M, Georgia Tech and LSU were the others).

But after the War, it seemed a bright line began to be drawn dividing southern football from the rest of the country. Since 1946, a total of 28 college programs have won national championships, and southern teams account for half of those winners over the last 73 years! The SEC can claim seven of those programs; the ACC boasts four.

Some of the pre-War old guard programs have faded dramatically. Minnesota, winner of five national titles in the 1930s and 1940s, now can count fewer than 20 winning seasons over the last 50 years, including the embarrassment of finishing 11th in the "B1G Ten" in 2007.

A case was often made that big city newspapers and their sportswriters' bias favored northern teams, and especially Notre Dame. Look no further than the 1956 Heisman trophy being awarded to Paul Hornung who quarterbacked his Norte Dame team to a 2-9 record that season. Hornung threw 13 interceptions, but still collected enough votes to beat out running back Johnny Majors and his 10-1 Tennessee Volunteers. One can imagine someone in some newsroom somewhere saying, "What the hell, let's just give it to Notre Dame. I don't know anybody in Tennessee."

The rise of ESPN and 24-hour programming turned the world upside down, and expanded Internet coverage vastly increased the national exposure of southern football. The new college football playoff system is creating considerable angst among those who already think southern football gets too much attention.

USA Today frets about the fatigue factor of seeing the same teams dominate. Radio talk show host and national college football writer George Schroeder complained, "The College Football Playoff appears to be contracting, becoming more regionalized. Vast swaths of the country are left out."

Without saying it directly, those "vast swaths of the country being left out" seem for the moment to be everyone outside the deep south. The official College Football Playoff National Championship began in 2014 with the game between Ohio State and Oregon, who defeated Florida State in a semifinal. Since then, participation has been confined to Alabama, Clemson and Georgia, and those bright southern lights are only becoming more brilliant.

We Seminoles enjoy more advantages than we sometimes care to acknowledge. But that's OK. We're fans and we're Southerners. Florida State is in the right place, and our time at the head of the table will come again soon enough.