It is said Southeast Conference football fans are passionate.  How passionate?  Well let’s see.  How about when last week’s LSU – Alabama football was over, two LSU fans confronted an Alabama fan at his Evergreen Alabama home and met with fatal gunfire.
    
     We must say this was unnecessary, stupid, a crying shame – a waste of life.
     Hold it buster!  This is football in Alabama – more important than life!

     No.  It’s just a game, a diversion, a pastime.
     What!?  Are you kidding?  What planet are you from?  This is the South. Bar-B-Que and eating are important.  But they ain’t football. 

     Okay.  I’ll give you that.  It is the South, home of the biggest whiskey distillers in the world.  We’re betting alcohol was involved…!
     So you’re Sherlock Holmes now?  Where’s your trench coat?  And your Watson?  OF COURSE alcohol was involved!

     Let’s see now.  A man and a woman – the Smiths—call Mike Williams on the phone, trash talk about the game, get into a shouting match and then Dennis and Donna, the Smiths, jump in their car, drive over to Evergreen, pull out a pistol from a glove compartment, stomp on Williams’ front porch, showing the pistol. And then are surprised when Williiams blows Dennis away with a shotgun!
     Now you’re catching on.

     But I don’t understand why, after seeing her ex-husband blown away by a Mossburg 12-gauge, Donna Smith would continue to threaten the shooter.
     I guess she didn’t think he had any more shells in his shotgun.  Or, she was so shocked she didn’t see him reload!

     So, you’re saying football rivalry arguments can result in double-murders?
     Yeah.  You think Nicole Simpson might have been a Bruins fan?

     Okay, I’ve got to ask.  What makes southerners, who are known to be friendly and hospitable, so darned crazy when it comes to Southeast Conference football?
     Glad you asked.  This goes back 75 years and for most of those years college football was all they had.  In all those states, there were little pro sports and still that way in Alabama, Mississippi, Kentucky and South Carolina.  To the rest of the world you were low-class second-cousins, but football was the great leveler.  Here, in the BCS conference with the lowest average personal income, highest gun ownership, and the highest average crowd attendance…well,that  makes for rabid frothing fans.

     Let’s see if I’ve got the formula?  Rednecks + football + alcohol equal hot-headed primal passion, and sometimes temporary insanity?
     I don’t have a kewpie doll but if I did you’d be taking it home.

     So these guys, the Smiths and Mike Williams were probably big supporters of their schools, liked to go to the games?
    I doubt they ever set foot on either campus.