I dont know a single person from the south that likes nfl better. Agree to disagree.
I know the rest of the country thinks we are insane though.
What town in the south is 4 hours away from a sec team that made the saints more accessible? Biloxi? Lsu is close.
You've never spent much time in or around south Louisiana then. And Charlotte is most certainly a southern town. I've spent a looooot of time there. Just as many tobacco spitting, gun rights ranting, far right southerners in and around Charlotte as anywhere you described as being "the south". The only thing largely different about it is it's a financial capital and there is a lot of money there unlike most places outside of Atlanta.
I grew up in Gulfport, and LSU had a real bad stigma around the coast. You liked LSU if you planned on going to junior college to go into HVAC training or were the kind of person who put rims on a 10 year old F-150 with a big fleur-de-lis decal that somehow made up a picture of a buck and fish on your back window. Even then, LSU tickets were/are impossible to come across unless you've got serious money and Baton Rouge is a nightmare to get to and from. New Orleans was a few stops down I-10 and the Superdome was the first thing off the exit. There was always a friend whose dad had extra tickets and was willing to take us, and when I got into my high school days tickets were easy to come across and were still relatively cheap compared to what some of you pay in donations and what-not for season tickets at MSU. I had good tickets for the Saints Falcons game 2 seasons ago where Drew broke the passing record and the Saints clinched the division and only paid $40. Back in 2008 my cousin who was a student bought me a visitor student section ticket for I think Vandy (we didn't know better at this point) and it was more than that.
The reason the south doesn't care about pro sports compared to everyone else is because we have so few teams and most of them are in Florida where no one gives a crap. I guess I'm one of the few segments that can say they had easier access to the NFL than quality college football.
I think the biggest thing was not having parents who gave a **** about college athletics. My mother went to USA and grew up in Dallas where they had season tickets to the Rangers. Her first job was in Houston where one of the perks was club seats to the Astros. To this day I have to explain the whole concept of amateur status to her, but she knows more about cap space and whatnot than I do. She's met Nolan Ryan a handful of times and can probably name all the QB's who have won SB's with the Cowboys but can't name you any of the top 20 consensus NCAA football programs. At the point I decided to go to MSU I was one of the few kids at the lunch table who hadn't gone to games with their parents since birth either there or somewhere else. My first game was my senior year when I went to the 3-2 Auburn game with my cousin.
Again, don't get me wrong. I love MSU football. Live and die by that ****, and it's not that I didn't watch MSU games growing up... I just didn't have any rooting interest until high school. Wasn't something I turned on as much as it was just something I watched with friends.
