Things That Are Kinda Like Other Things

You know what would be a bad idea?  A really, really BAD idea?

Trying to foist a football rivalry on two schools that have only played each other a couple/three times and are separated by almost 900 miles, that’s a BAD idea.  It seems forced.  It seems desperate.  It seems amateurish.

It seems to imply that we don’t have rivalries, when in fact we have rivalries galore.  Our rivalry with CTU to the side (I mean, at some point don’t they have to actually beat us in a major sport again to qualify this as a rivalry? (Tweet that.  (yes I’m now in the third parenthetical thought (deal with it)))) we still have a pretty heated contest each year with the folks up in Athens.  And the UT/SC Halloween game is always a spectacle.  The HBC has added a dimension to the UF/SC tilt.  And then we have the natural rivalry that pops up every year with whatever North Carolina school volunteers for their inevitable spanking.

The idea is based, apparently, on the fact that our two universities are located in cities with the same name.   Nevermind that we call ours “Cola” while they call their’s “CoMo.”  Forget that the football history between the two schools includes basically two games – both of which found the Gamecock players completely losing interest at halftime. And forget that the mean temperature of Columbia, MO is a cool 64 degrees while the same measurement is never even taken in Columbia, SC (our thermometers melt every July). Pastides believes we MUST have a football rivalry!

Count me as a solid “Nay” vote on this proposition.

Or wait, lets go the OTHER way – lets make EVERYONE our rival based on random similarities between completely disconnected facts.  For Example:

– Battle for the Tailgate:  South Carolina’s Fairgrounds and The Grove at Ole Miss

– Battle for the Bag of Fried Chicken:  We have a Bojangles right next to the Stadium and CTU has a Chick-fila on its campus – wait, it doesn’t?

– Battle for the Towns that Sherman Burned Down:  Savannah doesn’t have D1 football, so I’ll go with SC/GTech

– Battle for the Holtz:  SC/Arkansas (although Lou still loves us and hate the stinking hog crap outa them for some reason)

– Battle for the Blowfish:  We had Hootie, Kansas had Mangino

– Battle for the Base:  We can see Fort Jackson, The Cuban National Soccer Team can see Gitmo.

See how ridiculous it is to partner random similarities and try to extract some meaning?

Dr. Pastides, let me offer the following illustration to assist you in discussing our rivalries.  Starting with the top left and traveling clockwise around the photo below, our rivals must 1) have fans in line there today, 2) be located east of this thing, 3) been sponsored at some point by this, and 4) always consider mustard as a condiment here.