Southbound Traveler: An Outsider’s Journey into the Heart of SEC Fan Culture

Weddings scheduled around a college football team’s bye week. Children taken out of school on Fridays so their family can attend away games. Public officials who win or lose elections based on their college affiliation. Welcome to life in the Southeastern Conference (SEC), the most fanatical family in college football, if not all of college sports. In the fall of 2014, self-professed Notre Dame super fan James March left his home in Chicago to discover for himself what the SEC was really like. 10,000 miles, eighteen games, and four months later, the result was Southbound Traveler, a candid first-person account from the front lines of a unique American subculture. Along his journey March meets a mix of unforgettable characters including fratty elites with mop top comb-overs; friendly good ol’ boys in overalls who use cuss words like punctuation; transplants who swear you don’t have to be born in the South to be a real fan; and families so divided by rooting interests that every holiday dinner is a war of attrition. Part memoir and part cultural exploration, Southbound Traveler examines what makes sports fanaticism so alluring in the first place-and why the game of football means so much to so many across the South.