My folks have season tickets to Auburn Men’s Basketball. And, they’re not just season ticket holders, they’re also contributors to the basketball scholarship fund which gets them entrance into the hospitality section where there’s free food and swag. Well, they couldn’t go to one of the games, so they gave those tickets to a friend of theirs from church. Months later, he gave them tickets to the Auburn football Spring A-Day scrimmage game. But these were no ordinary tickets; they were for seats up in one of the luxury box suites. Needless to say, my parents were living the high-life that day. Great seats, free food, private seating. And oh yeah, Auburn’s offence looked pretty good too. It’s a shame their defence looked so bad. Oh well.
Spring scrimmage games serve one main function (from a fan’s perspective): To create just enough excitement and optimism to keep fan’s interest peaked through the next 4 months until the season begins.
Thinking of football has also made me reflect on what a successful season Auburn and the SEC at large had last year. Going into the bowls, there were plenty who doubted the SEC’s ongoing claim as the toughest conference in the land. But, Florida and LSU showed that top of the SEC is second to none, while teams like Auburn, Georgia, Kentucky, and South Carolina showed that mediocre in the SEC is still pretty good.
It reminds me of a quote from Homer (not Simpson) describing Zeus’ power in relation to the other Greek gods:
“Or come on, try it, gods… Hang a golden rope down from Heaven, and all you gods and goddesses take hold of it: but you could not pull Zeus down from Heaven to the ground… But whenever I had a mind to pull in earnest, I could haul you up, earth and sea and everything; then I could hitch the rope on the peak of Olympus, so that everything, once more, should hang in mid-air.”
Yep… that pretty much describes SEC football.
