Expand the Playoffs

As I write this, the teams for the 2020 NCAA Football Championship game is set and for the fifth year in a row, and for past 15 of 16 years, a team from Dixie will be the national champion. As a man who loves football, Dixie, and the SEC it’s been an incredible run. Yeah, it’s not as good as it used to be, even when I was a kid – the SEC has lost much of its Dixian identity, with even Ole Miss (the school, if not the fans) scrapping its Confederate imagery and the crop of players now have, shall we say, trouble with the law, but I still remain a fan.

It’s in my blood. But, it also has given me time to reflect on how much better things are now in one respect – the playoffs. It has made the game more exciting and now it feels like the players, rather than a computer, will decide who the national champion is, which reduces my worry that a deserving SEC team will succumb to a tough schedule, while a team in a lesser conference will get in on the basis of going undefeated playing a bunch of Mickey Mouse teams.

Lately though, I have come to understand that the playoffs serve as an important defense of Dixie and her traditions. And, not only is keeping the playoffs important, but they also need to be expanded. To understand why, we have to go back to the 1970 Alabama Crimson Tide Team. Back then, the #1 team in the country, per polling, would invite the #2 or #3 team in the country for the national championship game. And back then, every year, no matter how good the team was, Alabama would be ranked no higher than #2 and the #1 team would rank the #3 team. You see, the Alabama football team was all white and teams outside of Dixie wanted to break that. There had been moves before to integrate, but the booster club would always block it. Finally, in 1970 the USC Trojans played Alabama in Birmingham and stopped the Tide 42-21, with the black running back, Sam Cunningham, scoring every touchdown. It is widely seen as the game that ended all-white teams in Dixie and also a game I’m convinced Bear Bryant threw, as a token integrated Alabama team beat USC the very next season 17-10.    

And, it’s why the playoffs are so important now in keeping what is left of our identity. Our enemies know we love football and will (and have) use that against us. If we still had the #1 team versus the #2 team of the pre-playoff era, or even worse the #1 team invites either the #2 or #3 team to the national championship, a situation could develop where Dixian teams were threatened with no hope of a national championship unless they give in. Your state refuses to ditch the Confederate imagery on its flag? Your state passes a law protecting the unborn? Your state passes a law protecting Christians in the workplace? As long as few teams can have a shot at the national championship, it becomes easy to pull off.

This has been done with jobs in the past and why Maryland and Virginia are gone to the enemy. It’s why Texas, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida are next on the chopping block. “Pro-business” Republicans gave them tax breaks to come in and when they started making demands, they lacked the spine to stand up to them. Fortunately, though, that game is over. More and more normies are waking up to what the “job creators” have done and no longer feel like selling their souls for the hope that jobs come. It’s why so many states have passed protections for the unborn despite corporate backlash- i.e. Netflix threating Georgia.    

Football, though, I feel remains our Achille’s heel and if only two teams are selected by a committee, then it is a lot easier for them to exclude states that have tried to fight back. Expanding that to four teams makes it harder to exclude those teams though – expanding it to 6 or 8 teams makes it even harder. We used to live in a world where “safe, legal, and rare” was the slogan for the abortionist, not “my abortion was fabulous.” It was a world where almost everyone thought that transgenders were off their rockers. It was a world where almost everyone thought that it was ridiculous to sue a Christian baker for refusing to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Since then, every single one of those positions have become mainstream left-wing talking points. Do you really think that, at this point, there would not be some kind of push to punish Dixian teams by excluding them from the National Championship?

Football, especially college football, is for Dixians what hockey is for Canadians, part of our national identity. It’s why the Iron Bowl takes on a significance that is only surpassed by Christmas and Easter in Alabama. It is why little boys throughout our land dream of playing football, and not so much winning a Super Bowl for the Dallas Cowboys, San Francisco 49ers, Chicago Bears, or New York Giants; but rather winning a championship for the Auburn Tigers, Texas Longhorns, Georgia Bulldogs, or Florida State Seminoles.

Football is part of our culture and we’re very good at it, but the enemy can use that against us. They already have, of course, as the game I mentioned earlier and everything that came as a result of that game. The playoffs though, by letting the game be settled on the field, serves to stop some of that, even if it is not foolproof and it is why, for Dixie’s sake, the playoffs must be expanded.

-By Dixie Anon