2012 BCS National Championship Rootability Index: Who Should You Pull For Tonight?

The Rootability Index helps you, the uninvested neutral viewer, who to root for in bowl games. You have no choice but to take sides tonight, dear reader, as this is the last hurrah for the 2011-12 college football season, the BCS Title Game.

ROOTABILITY FACTORS. Do you have thoughts about the BCS, or how a playoff would fix all this? Does the exclusion of teams like Oklahoma State from the 2011 championship selection process anger you? Do you have a solution for all this, one that would fix all of the evils of college football and lead us all to a new land of festive gridiron happiness?

You do! That’s great, because WOOOOOO ESS-EEE-SEEE. This restaurant does not care what you have back in Ohio, or California, or Utah, or whatever other sensible, well-run place you come from in the country. You have two flavors to choose from here: SEC West team one, or SEC West team two. Please file all complaints about this menu to our caring management via a comment card.*

*There is no management, and there are no comment cards.

The two flavors tonight do cover a wide range of playing styles and philosophies. Alabama likes to run the ball first with their freakishly gifted running backs and bruising offensive line, and then keep the game short, nasty, and brutish with a disciplined and unforgiving defense. In contrast, LSU likes to do that exact same thing, but play special teams, too. These teams are remarkably similar, and you should probably ignore the first sentence of this paragraph completely.

The styles of play being comparable, one is left with style. I don’t mean to imply that you are Communist, but does the Red Army Anthem move you in ways you don’t want to admit to friends? Is a small part of you turned on by a little healthy fascism in your life? Alabama demands your allegiance, then. No other team comes as close to conflating the iconography of Father Stalin’s Workers’ Fun Camp than Alabama, and no other fan base goes as close to the point of confusing religious worship with football fandom as Alabama’s. (See the Coca-Cola bottles at Bear Bryant’s grave, and then try to doubt the iconography at work here.)

You should also root for Alabama if any of the following things apply to you.

The festive violence of LSU football, meanwhile, makes them the colorful Visigoth to Alabama’s grim Roman centurions. Their marketing department is better than yours, and that is why your team does not have awesome, school-sponsored victory videos coupled with an official Twitter feed that is openly taunting Alabama fans today.

LSU fans bring with them the spirits of Louisana. We primarily mean “alcohol distilled from marshgrass and pesticide” when we say this, but we also mean the festive, carnival-style fatalism of the LSU fanbase. They do not know whether they are showing up to a celebration or a funeral, but the reaction to either will be the same: music, some friendly fistfights, cursing, overly indulgent eating, and a ripping hangover either way. The LSU fanbase may or may not be right for you. Do not ask your doctor about taking LSU, because he or she won’t let you.

The following people must by default root for LSU:

If these apply to you, your choice has already been made.

LEAN: LSU. Better food, the Les Clap, and the promise of a party no matter the outcome proves too much to resist.