It was a great weekend. College football is back! I spent 10 hours in my recliner, watching Southeastern Conference teams and eating anything I could dip into something else. I didn't get a lick of exercise. I even thought I might hire an illegal immigrant - to carry me from my chair to the 'fridge and back to my TV - before Donald Trump runs them all out of the country.
After watching both political parties beat each other up, it was nice to watch opposing sides give each other concussions over something other than the Iran nuclear deal and who is waging a war on women. Nothing grabs our interest more than college football punctuated by commercials featuring cleavage, erectile dysfunction pills and beer.
After eight consecutive years of Southern teams winning the national championship, Ohio State beat Alabama for the title last year. Afterward, Ohio State increased head coach Urban Meyer's annual salary to $6.5 million. Universities make hundreds of millions in football revenue, but they still do not pay the players - proving Southerners' point that the North fought the Civil War over secession and not to end slavery.
When Ohio State won with a third-string quarterback last year, Coach Meyer said, "He does not know the meaning of the word 'fear.'" Based on his SAT verbal score, he doesn't know the meaning of a lot of other words, either.
The last time a non-Southern team won the title was after the 2004 season, when USC beat Oklahoma. USC was then stripped of the title for using a player later ruled ineligible, Reggie Bush, who was punished by the NCAA and forced to date Kim Kardashian. The tainted national title was then offered to Auburn and other SEC schools, who refused it. As a matter of political principle, Southern states don't like handouts.
Northern elites resent pretty much anything Southern; that is why it is fashionable to be snarky about colleges in the South. To be fair to Northerners, if I lived in a state that smelled like bong water, had high taxes, a race-riot-based economy and which lost its top high school football recruits to the South every year, I'd be angry, too. The North is left with only hockey, which is its own punishment.
After last year's Ohio State aberration, it looks like a Southern team will end up on top again, and the world will make sense. Notre Dame, of course, is again over-ranked in the polls, given that every Catholic sports writer in the North votes for the Fighting Irish. They will again falter. It's too bad the Irish do not have some sort of time-honored custom in which they commiserate with each other and drown their sorrows.
It has become difficult to get four SEC teams into the College Football Playoff. They have to play each other, and even Mississippi State and Vanderbilt have been going to bowl games. They tend to have more losses. But steel sharpens steel, so the SEC teams, once they are in playoff games, tend to win.
I hope political correctness-seeking, geographic affirmative action doesn't continue to shape CFP picks. Let the best teams win. Two years ago, the game between Alabama and Georgia preceding the BCS games was the de facto national championship.
Psychiatrists will tell you that football in the USA is a proxy that satisfies our lust for war. But just to be safe, our government still gets us involved in a lot of wars around the world.
Rest assured, the South beating the North in football is rooted in far deeper issues than an amateur athletic contest. It might just be maneuvers in preparation for secession.
Ron Hart is a syndicated, op-ed humorist, author, and TV and radio commentator. Contact him at Ron@RonaldHart.com.