Roll Tide!

George Will has this column about the culture of college football, specifically the Roll Tide brand of football. He writes about people who miss their daughter’s wedding because she scheduled it on a game day. He writes about a person who risked being taken off of a heart transplant list just to go see Alabama play on the road.

My favorite line is the one about the externalities of sport contests:

“But in every region, sport can produce a collective mind, or sometimes a collective setting aside of mind.”

So, is the commonality associated with sports an external benefit or cost?