thedailywhat:

Culture Shock of the Day: Stephen Fry uses the Iron Bowl to sum up America.

[reddit.]

I love Stephen Fry, but he doesn’t get it. At the same time, I understand why the Iron Bowl would look so ridiculous to foreigners - it looks just as ridiculous to Americans who do not like football. Most regular season games are not full of such pomp and circumstance, but for some people, this isn’t just any game.

The Iron Bowl, to most Alabama and Auburn fans, is the most important game of the year. To some, it is more important than winning the SEC, or even a national championship. I myself have a bad habit of resting the judgment of seasons on the shoulders of an Iron Bowl outcome. 

It is, arguably (but not by much), the dirtiest and most infamous rivalry in all of college football, if not all sports. There are people who truly hate each other and commit crimes over this stuff.

I can’t justify the profundity I attach to the Iron Bowl to anyone who doesn’t already subscribe to the same profundity. Why care so much about something that really is, at the end of the day, completely trivial? My unfortunate answer is: I don’t know. My passions pick me, not the other way around.

Be that as it may, this video was painfully truthful, even within the context of the Iron Bowl. Perhaps especially within the context of the Iron Bowl.

I promise to stop being a college football nerd as soon as the season starts next week. I’m just deprived and need to vent somewhere, y’know. The last few weeks before the new season are always the worst.

(via fuckyeahstudentsections)