For a certain segment in college football, every loss, every mistake, means just one thing: heads must roll.

by Pat Dooley (BSJ ’74)

Maybe it’s me. Maybe I have lived my whole life in the state of Florida and don’t realize how it is in other places.

But I have traveled a lot and listened to talk shows in other parts of the country and covered many events all over the place. So, I don’t think I am being provincial here.

All I know is this – when a college football team loses a game in the SEC, the fans take it way more personally than they do anywhere else in the USA.

OK, maybe not at Vanderbilt. At the other 13 schools (and Texas and Oklahoma will fit right in), the fan bases look at losses like someone just stole their girlfriend, killed their hunting dogs and swiped a handful of bills from the collection plate.

Everyone.

Must.

Be.

Fired.

Now.

Forget that the people who want to fire coaches don’t have to come up with the millions in buyouts. The game was lost. It’s somebody’s fault.

“Somebody has to pay,” said Tony Barnhart, who has covered SEC football for four decades and goes by the moniker “Mr. College Football. “That’s baked into the DNA of our culture.”

It’s never that a defender caused a fumble. It’s that your guy has greased hands.

It’s never that an offensive coordinator who spent days scouting your defense came up with a great play call. It’s that your defensive coordinator blew it.

It’s never that a quarterback’s girlfriend broke up with him and he was not all there mentally.

It’s that his coaches didn’t get him to that place. (This is a long story I will tell you sometime, peeps.)

It’s not that a defensive player made a brilliant play to leap into the air to block a kick. It’s that the kicker didn’t get it high enough.

“It’s never that the other team did something right,” said TV host Paul Finebaum. “It’s that your team did something wrong.”

And SEC fans take it personally. Don’t eat, don’t sleep because plays run over and over in their heads. They drink a lot and that makes it worse, not better.

They are agitated and angry. You know the SEC motto: “It Just Means More … Angst.”

The SEC is like the two-party system in American politics. The other side can never do anything right. Only the side you are on understands the way things are supposed to be done.

And we all know how both bases respond to losing, whether it’s an election or a football game.

It’s like the great writer Lewis Grizzard said when asked why a certain game was so important – “This is our way of life against theirs.”

Kind of sounds Civil War-like, doesn’t it? That’s how important college football game results are to the fan bases in the SEC.

“The thing about the SEC is that you go to church the next day and you have to listen to fans of another team giving you a hard time,” Barnhart said.

And that’s really getting personal.

That’s the thing about the SEC. Most of the schools are in small towns with barely an airport. You go to big cities and, yes, they are screaming for someone’s job but it’s the Yankees manager or the Laker who missed all the free throws.

This is supposed to be just a game played by student-athletes. Yeah, right. (And with NIL and the transfer portal, it’s hardly going to get better).

After Alabama lost on a last-second field goal to Texas A&M earlier this year, there were fans calling Finebaum’s show asking for the head of defensive coordinator Pete Golding. How dare he let us down?

And then they started criticizing NICK SABAN!, perhaps the greatest college coach ever, for doing too many Aflac commercials.

“It’s what separates the SEC from everyone else,” Finebaum said. “Most of us don’t have anything else. Even when there is a pro team nearby, nothing takes precedence over your college team.”

It can get vicious or just downright criminal, like it did when the late Harvey Updyke, who has a son named Bear after Bear Bryant, poisoned the iconic trees they roll with toilet paper at Toomer’s Corner in Auburn, Ala., after the Tigers beat Alabama in 2010.

Or when Tennessee fans littered the field with everything from golf balls to a mustard bottle to water bottles filled with tobacco spit and delayed the game earlier this season after a call went against them late in the Ole Miss game.

It was personal.

Everyone is out to get everybody.

Especially the refs. You know that the other team paid them off.

There is nothing like the depression after a loss in the SEC. But this one thing is something I have learned to be a fact ever since the overtime rule went into effect for this great sport:

Every SEC football game has a winner and every SEC football game has a loser.

It just had better not be us. Or there will be hell to pay.