It is Thanksgiving Weekend, which means family get togethers, turkey and football. Most of my work the last twenty years has been in the South, where people have religions (plural). One is what most people consider religion. The other is college football (except for college basketball in Kentucky). For a long time there were no major league professional sports teams in the South. Interstate and intrastate rivalries on the gridiron were the substitute. This has not changed much now that bigtime pro sports has hit the South. For three hours on Saturday, everything in Alabama will stop for the Iron Bowl, this year played at Auburn. The Crimson Tide are heavily favored, but that means little in this game. The War Eagle will try to fire up the home crowd. It is unlikely that the Finnish rock group Darude ever anticipated that their 1999 song "Sandstorm" would lead to what is now a new tradition before the kickoff at Williams Brice Stadium in Columbia, South Carolina, a city where I have...(Read Full Post)