TIME

The Holy Game

It has been said that college football is a religion, and Saturday is its High Holy Day. So I was not surprised when I found myself at synagogue in Knoxville in September on Kol Nidre, the Friday evening start of Yom Kippur—the most solemn day of the Jewish year—and the rabbi asked who I favored in the next day’s Georgia-Tennessee game.

Of course he did. If college football is America’s lay religion, the South is its ecumenically evangelical center. Nowhere is

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