The zombie idea that there must be college football in the South despite a global pandemic does not appear to be about just college football. Even as coronavirus risks cited by widespread medical advice have convinced a majority of schools across the nation to close their stadiums, caution apparently is gone with the wind in the South.

Because, as Florida State English professor Diane Roberts noted in the Washington Post, “In the South, college football has long been a sort of do-over for the Civil War.”

The three major conferences intent on soldiering on—the SEC, Big 12 and ACC—have 25 of their 37 institutions based in the states from the former Confederacy (plus another five from Civil War “border states”). And a rebel legacy clearly is asserting itself on the gridirons of Dixie.

“Football,” Southern historian James Cobb told me years ago, “is a place where the Lost Cause reasserts itself. It’s a component of the South’s need to industrialize and beat the North at its own game. A way to re-fight the Civil War.”

It was during an assignment at the University of Tennessee three decades ago that then-Tennessee coach Johnny Majors, who died in June at 85, reminisced about how “even when I was a kid, so many people I knew would talk about the Yankees, what they’d done to us.” He made it clear that one answer to the Yanks’ superiority complex was the South’s football success; Majors not only had been an All-American player at the school in 1956, but also coached three SEC championship teams there.

Pulitzer Prize-winning Southern author Rick Bragg, in a 2012 essay for ESPN, confirmed that college football in the South “has been an antidote to often dark history for as long as even our oldest people can recall. We are of long memory here. I gave a talk once in Mobile, Ala., and mentioned that the Southern aristocracy had been on the wrong and losing side in two great conflicts: The Civil War and the civil rights movement, prompting one older gentleman to rise from his seat, huffing that I did not know what I was talking about, and leave the room.

“Later, I said I was surprised that mentioning the turbulent 1960s would anger anyone so, after so much time. A nice gentleman told me, no, that wasn’t it. ‘He’s still mad,’ the nice man said, ‘about the war.’”

It’s now 155 years in the past.  Roughly five generations ago.

But forget, hell. From 1939 to 2001, there was an annual All-Star football bowl called the Blue-Gray Game—contested in the original Confederate capital of Montgomery, Ala.—between players who competed for colleges in the North against players from schools in the former Confederate states, and which outfitted the teams in the colors of the Union and Rebel armies. With, by the way, the added historical element that Black players were banned until 1965.

In his 2001 book, “King Football,” Oregon State University professor Michael Oriard, who had played collegiately and professionally, documented that the “three major Southern conferences remained entirely segregated until 1963” when Maryland, then in the ACC, first accepted a Black player. The Southwest Conference—its highest profile teams now are in the Big 12 (Texas and Oklahoma) or SEC (Texas A&M and Arkansas)—wasn’t fully integrated until 1970 and the SEC not until 1972.

Furthermore, Oriard wrote, “the most powerful force for integration was not high-minded principle but the need to win football games…”

The irony is that, in re-fighting the Civil War, Southern teams commenced doing so by recruiting Blacks (and Yankees), even as the majority of Southern college fans, student bodies, coaches and administrators has remained overwhelmingly white. In her Post essay, Roberts referenced a culture she called “retro-America” in which “racial roles are pretty stark….Older white men are in charge (85 percent of Power Five coaches are white) while young men of color—55 to 60 percent of the Power Five football teams—perform the labor.” Those numbers are even more dramatic in the three Southern leagues among the Power Five.

“Small wonder,” she added, “that civil rights historian Taylor Branch famously detected ‘a whiff of the plantation’ around college football.”

The Encyclopedia of Southern Culture declares that “more than any other sport, football seems to reflect characteristics of the South.” And Atlanta-based reporter/author Tony Barnhart has written, “Like all things in the South, the importance of college football can be traced back to the Civil War.”

To keep playing through a modern plague sounds like some argument for Southern states’ rights. And rites.