re: Conference Pride?

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Its not conference pride, its more regional pride.

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This and the Civil War thing have a lot of research going back to the 20s by media scholars and historians
to back them up. The 1926 Rose Bowl that Bama won was written about widely in the Southern papers as an opportunity
for the south to regain its dignity after the war and Reconstruction. When they actually won, it was a pretty
big deal down here because we could say we had something on par with anyone else that no one could take
from us. For years prior, teams in the North, Midwest, and West treated Southern football as a mediocre variation.
In the 20s that began to change.

Funny thing is that even back then, when we began to win, the rest of
the nation cringed. Georgia beating Yale in 29 is a big reason the Ivy League would eventually lock itself
inside its own walls and descend from a national power into obscurity. It was just too unseemly to getting beat
by a bunch of hayseeds.