Religion and the Origins of College Football in the South

If you'd like to know more about the religious origins of college football at LSU and the SEC, you might be interested in a lecture being given at LSU on Monday.

Title: "'Baton Rouge is Football Crazy': Religion and the Origins of College Football Mania in the South, 1892-1926" by Dr. Arthur Remillard, Associate Professor of Religious Studies at St. Francis University.

When: Monday, February 10th, at 3 pm

Where: Lawton Room, Tiger Stadium

In 1908, LSU's football team began their season with four wins before facing Auburn, a traditional powerhouse in the region. Few outside of Baton Rouge gave LSU much of a chance, so the southern sports world was shocked when the upstart squad defeated Auburn by a score of 10-2. LSU remained unbeaten for the season; however, sports journalists declared Auburn the "Champions of the South," as allegations of professionalism hovered over LSU's program. "The South was tired of this stuff," charged one critic. Meanwhile, LSU's president fervently defended the program, while fans theorized that their "ancient rivals" at Tulane had fabricated the charges.

In this presentation, Arthur Remillard uses LSU's controversial 1908 football season as an entry point for investigating the religious dimensions of college football's early days in the South. While imported from the North, the game quickly became a favorite on southern campuses and beyond. For players and fans alike, football fields were sacred places, and home teams inspired an array of potent symbols, powerful mythologies, and community-binding rituals. Indeed, long before "Tebowmania," college football had a distinct religious quality that enchanted the worldviews of southerners from the bayous of Louisiana to the mountains of Virginia.

Arthur Remillard teaches religious studies at Saint Francis University in Loretto, Pennsylvania. He is author of "Southern Civil Religions: Imagining the Good Society in the Post-Reconstruction Era," winner of the 2012 Harry T. and Harriette V. Moore Award from the Florida Historical Society. His current project is a book tentatively entitled "God and Games in Dixieland: Religion and the Making of the South's Modern Sports Culture, 1865-1930." You can read a recent Op-Ed written by Dr. Remillard in the Washington Post, entitled "Is Religion Losing Ground to Sports?" (LINK )