ClayNation: Fixin' to have good ole time on Dixieland Delight Tour

By doctor's orders, my grandfather was not allowed to watch University of Tennessee football games in his old age. Instead, he would call my uncle at halftime of each game and find out what the score was. If Tennessee was comfortably ahead, he would begin to watch the recorded version of the first half. If the game was close, he would wait to find out the final outcome.

If, God forbid, Tennessee lost, he would record over the game and never watch it.

The Dixieland Delight Tour begins in Knoxville as UT faces off against Cal. (Getty Images)

This was my introduction to Southeastern Conference football. At no point in my childhood did this story ever seem strange.

That's because I was born and raised in the South, a place where on Saturdays the uncertain flight of a football in the air seems to float on the collective breath of a region. If you don't care who wins between Alabama and Auburn, you aren't from Alabama. If you don't cringe when you hear the first strident chords of Gator Bait, then you aren't from Georgia. And if you don't speckle your sentences with y'all, fixin', or still call your dad "daddy" -- even when you are 70 and he is 90 -- then you're probably not going to understand everything I write.

That's OK. After all, everyone can't eat at Waffle House or never get tired of whiskey or win national championships in football. We still want the rest of you to come along for the ride.

This fall, I am embarking on what we have understatedly called the ClayNation Dixieland Delight College Football Tour. For 12 of the 13 weeks of the football season, I will be on the road. I will begin in early September in Knoxville for the UT-California game and, assuming I don't get lost attempting to find Fayetteville, I will finish in late November in Oxford for Ole Miss vs. Mississippi State.

In between, I will watch a game from every SEC stadium and experience football in a land that loves it more than any other. And I can't wait.

Football in the SEC is a religion founded on cleats, grass, pads, sweat, spite and the bountiful colors of the trees in autumn. It's a lifestyle embraced by millions of sun-drenched, besotted fools. Above all else, it is a passion linking generations. At some point, just about everyone who is reading this has been a kid whose hands were so small he could barely grip a regulation football. Yet you threw wobbling footballs, one after another, with your father, grandfather, uncle or football family as the hours before kickoff approached.

Each weekend, you see these kids all over the South, and if you're like me, for just a moment you'll relive again the youth you've left behind. And you know that the cycle of football in the South will never fade away because it's embedded so deeply into our culture.

Now I am grown and very mature. I do not break things when my team loses. I rarely curse at the television. I only slam doors after big losses and I do not wish for Steve Spurrier to be drawn, quartered and have each limb buried in the four corners of Neyland Stadium. After all, I'm grown and I know that it makes no sense to dig four graves when one underneath Smokey's doghouse would do just fine.

I also know better than to visit SEC campuses and stadiums without someone who has been there before. To that end, accompanying me on these forays into the wilds of Southern football will be alumni or fans as guides from each school, except Mississippi State. I have not excluded Mississippi State as a way of ridiculing the school, but, rather, because I am not sure anyone has actually ever graduated from there.

Most of these friends and alumni I will have met in Vanderbilt Law School, which incubated some of the fiercest SEC debates in the country during my three years. Lots of people think law school is a place where the most seminal issues facing our country are debated, analyzed and refined by the young of our nation. They are wrong. At least in the case of Vanderbilt, it was a place where some of the finest minds of the South spent hours inventively thinking about why your team sucked. I miss those days to no end.

In the process of law school, I ended up with friends who were alumni or grew up rooting for pretty much every SEC team. This made hating my team's rivals that much more difficult because it put a face on each team's particular fandom. Each Saturday that my team loses to my friend's team, I'm still not sure law school was worth it.

Dixieland Delight Tour Canons

Not Clay Travis. Please don't panic. (Provided to SportsLine)

1. I'm traveling as a fan. This means I will not have tickets provided and very well may end up sitting next to you in the highest section of the stadium. If you see me, I'll be the guy with a splotchy beard scribbling down notes in his pocket notebook. I may vaguely resemble the Unabomber. Do not be alarmed.

2. Every Monday this fall, come hell or high water, my column will be posted. I will do my best to keep the length of the columns manageable. I will probably fail.

3. At no point can Verne Lundquist be disrespected. This is serious. Let me say no more or I'll get worked up.

4. I am tailgating at every stadium and I'm interested in meeting as many of you as is possible. If there is a campus site or tradition I absolutely must see or a bar/restaurant I can't miss, by all means, e-mail and let me know. If these suggestions involve two-by-fours or chloroform, please accept my apologies for my inability to attend.

5. I like numbers because they help me organize things. So there will be lots of numbers in these columns. This may make you hate me. If so, I'm sorry you got paddled by your third grade math teacher. Get over it.

6. Pluto is still a planet. At some point, I may make witty astronomy analogies. For instance, Vandy is like the Pluto of the SEC. This will be infinitely funnier than if I said something lame like, Vandy is like the Neptune of the SEC.

7. We're big on acronyms here when they happen to correspond to 1980s wrestling finishing moves. Henceforth, within the column itself, we're calling this tour the DDT. And hopeful that Jake the Snake will give us an oily and ringlet-haired nod at some point in the future.

8. Hugs? Not so much. I am very big on fist bumps and Phil Mickelson-esque left-handed cap nods.

9. If you twist my arm, I will visit your sorority house.

10. It's 10 a.m. on the day of a Lincoln Financial game. I'm in just as bad of a mood as you are about the start time. Go easy on the yelling.

11. If you wear wristbands or wear your cap in any direction other than straight-ahead or backward, you need to read someone else. I'm sorry, but we have standards here.

12. As much as I might like to, I can't help you finish off three kegs in the pledge class basement. Actually ... yes I can.

13. Somehow I will be taking pictures with my digital camera and including them in my columns. I say somehow because I still have no idea how to transfer pictures to a computer. It seems like something that just shouldn't be possible. My wife will be handling all technical issues when I return home at the end of the trip. Smile, and if you must, flash a hand sign. The shocker is the preferred sign.

If you have a pet monkey, Clay Travis would like to meet you. (Getty Images)

14. If you travel with a pet monkey, I absolutely, no excuses, must meet you. If that monkey can dance to your team's fight song, I will take his (or her if the monkey is female) picture and you might become a tad bit famous. OK, not at all famous. I'm sorry. But you will still have a dancing monkey.

15. My friend Tardio has recently purchased 99 cent aviator sunglasses from Mapco Express and given them to me. I look a bit like Goose before he drowned. I lose sunglasses with an uncanny regularity; if you happen to come upon a pair of classy "Sunclassics" brand sunglasses downtrodden in the dirt of a Southern field, they are mine. Treat them with the honor and respect they so richly deserve.

16. In games not featuring the University of Tennessee, I will attempt to wear at least one article of clothing that is popular with the home crowd to further legitimize my fandom experience. Early leaders for Florida are jean shorts, for Georgia those atrocious tight red pants, and for Kentucky I will carry a mini-basketball. Further suggestions are, of course, much appreciated.

Basically the DDT is designed to be fun. And to the extent those of you who are SEC fans offer ideas, good humor, and some good ole Southern hospitality, I can guarantee you we're going to have a hell of a time this fall. It's one day until football season begins and I can hardly wait. I hope y'all will come along for the ride.