Amanda Brickell Bellows, a doctoral student at UNC, has penned one of the most fascinating pieces you'll ever read: a discussion on how the Civil War and post-Bellum era shaped, even created, college football.
The game is, and remains, a metaphor for war -- of that there can be little doubt. The virtues of violence, martial vigor, Protestant work ethos, zero-sum outcomes (recently, at least,) and militaristic jingoism dot the landscape as ubiquitously as pollen on a black car in March. Nor is this phenomenon unique to the South, where we in Alabama especially claim college football as a small token of redemption for a lost war, and (to some) the Lost Cause.