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Don’t get married on a Fall Saturday, anywhere

I tried to get this published elsewhere, but failed. I still like it. I’m sharing it here.

It started, perhaps, as an in-joke. Maybe a brother-in-law joke. Or a t-shirt, one of those hastily designed gaudy numbers you see at fan shops. Maybe the whole thing began as a bit on talk radio. Sometimes the organic nature of jokes, or even traditions, can be lost to us without a very serious investigation.

This is not that.

I remember it all those ways. A guy said it on the air, off the cuff, from the hip, and wherever else one-liners fall from. I saw it on a shirt. And, if you’re there long enough, you live it, unfortunately.

You don’t book weddings on fall Saturdays in the South.

I have been to several Saturday weddings in the fall in the Deep South, an exercise designed to weigh your love of sport and the ol’ alma mater against these two people standing up there. Who are those people, anyway? Strangers, probably. I mean, do you know the bride’s third quarter rushing stats? Have you memorized the tackle for loss numbers the groom has put up this season? What even is the win-loss record of the person performing this ceremony, anyway? Alternatively, it could be a deliberate measure to keep attendance low.

I mention this because, of course, weddings are organized far in advance, but not farther out than the more-than-a-century long tradition of watching dudes hit each other as hard as they can for temporary victory and immortal glory. Long is the memory, short is the ceremony. The same is true for any given football play, but one of these two events lasts longer in the memory of most of us.

Authurine Babineaux and Merrick Bourgeois — two people we don’t know at all, but who prove my point nicely — were married on Saturday, October 31st in 1959 in Cankton, Louisiana, right there at St. John Berchman Catholic Church. The writeup in the paper, as was the custom, describes the bride’s dress and what her attendant was wearing. There’s a photo with the notice, the image has gone fuzzy with digitization, but the new Authurine Bourgeois looks beautiful. The groom is wearing a white jacket. They had a little reception in the cafeteria of the school they both attended. Maybe they met there. Maybe they hit it off there. We don’t know. We do know there was a four-layer cake. We don’t know when the celebration ended, or if they were able to catch Billy Cannon’s immediately legendary punt return.

There are more than 2,000 returns for “married Oct 31” in the 1959 Louisiana newspapers. And some of, most of, or, perish the thought, all of those people who attended missed Billy Cannon’s Halloween Run at Death Valley. But which did they talk about more, as the years passed?

My first fall wedding on a Saturday in the South was in 1993. It was November 20th. It was 11th ranked Alabama at number 6 Auburn. It was the Iron Bowl.

It was a wedding in someone’s home. And they chose to do this event during the football game.

Perhaps there was some other event scheduled in the living room in the next hour.

Oh, the service was lovely, marred only by my running up and down the hall, getting scoring updates from the radio from the bedroom where the groom had previously been getting ready. “Does anyone have a reason these too should not be wed? And what is the score, young man?” Even then, as a young football fan, I wanted to share the news, and that news was the game and newly emerged folk heroes.

Auburn won that game 22-14. The Tigers were on probation that year: no bowls and no TV. Some entrepreneurial outfit sold Radio National Championship bumper stickers. They were everywhere for a time.

That house, where the wedding was, was full of people. I wonder which event is more memorable all these years later.

In October of 2012, my wife and I (who were married in the summer, thank you very much) attended a wedding that was scheduled on the Third Saturday in October. In the South, you capitalize it just like that. The Third Saturday in October. This is the Alabama-Tennessee game, a joyous collision that seriously impacts commerce in two states. Alabama being atop the polls and facing a heated rival probably hampered the wedding’s turnout. There were some other big games with implications that day third-ranked Florida was taking on ninth-ranked South Carolina, number six LSU had Texas A&M, ranked as the 20th best team in the land.

Why, I asked the bride, beforehand, did you choose this time of year? This date? She attended a huge football school. As did her brother and her mother and her father before her. As did everyone up and down her family tree. As did her husband.

She offered that the weather is too unpredictable in the spring. (It is not.) And that there would be TVs at the reception. (There were not.) It was a fine wedding. I remember there was a bar at the reception – but no TVs with games. On the bar were little chalkboards which told you the preferred drinks of the bride and groom, so you could order the same and be just like them. I don’t remember her choice, but the groom’s drink was rum and Coke.

You don’t have to ask yourself where he was on the idea of a Saturday wedding in the fall.

A few years later, in 2016, we attended a wedding in Tennessee. One of those where the bride and groom had reserved a beautiful chapel and everyone looked terrific, and every single person was in a festive mood. It was a mild October day. I was just getting over a cold and had a terrible coughing fit during the middle of the service. I left so as not to interrupt the beautiful ceremony.

I regained my composure but couldn’t get back to my seat without causing another scene, so I eased up the side of the chapel, and stood along the wall behind these guys.

He was anxious about the event; the game I mean. That installment of the Tennessee-Georgia series turned out to have one of the wildest finishes in the history of the sport. Those border rivalries are always tense, taut, and played close to the rented tuxedo vest.

The young couple got married and we gathered outside for the ceremonial send off. The bride and groom ran through the gathered loved ones and into the waiting car. That’s when the bomb was thrown, and the subsequent Hail Mary.

And that’s when this grown man, the guy above, a pillar of his community, a member of the local education board who was eager to see off a loved one started doing chest slides in the lawn in front of the chapel. The bride was beautiful. The bride was upstaged.

This isn’t about me, but that would become one of my bigger moments on social media. All the right people and outlets amplified the post and eventually it got back to the guy above, a person I did not know. I thought he might be angry that I’d outted him in profile. He thought it was hilarious. I assume that’s because his team won.

And that’s one of the risks you take with a wedding during football season. What happens if the wrong team wins. Now who has a sour taste in their mouth about your wedding day? Your guests? Your partner? Your parents? You?

“But, dear writer,” you may say, “this is not my concern. I am not in the South. I will not be wed in the South. I live here, in the world wide web.”

Fair enough, bride-elect or bridegroom-elect, but consider, that sport is part of culture. We, being social creatures, export the best parts of our culture. This, of course, is made that much easier – and each game made that much more important – because of the dazzling array of streaming and cable packages available to us today. These, then, are cautionary tales for the entire country, certainly a lesson less and less limited to the South.

Put another way, UConn and UMass have been at it since the 19th century, that series is tied, and they have two contests coming up in the next few years. Don’t ask a Huskie or the Minutemen to choose.

If you’ve got love and joyous union on the mind and there are leaves and footballs in the air, consider your audience, and consider the spring or the summer. Green leaves also make for a beautiful photographic backdrop. Baseballs are flying around.

Your guests will likely be paying much more attention to you than a routine pop up to right.

adventures / football / Philadelphia / photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
6
Nov 25

It’s a high pitched honking sound, which trills up at the end

A breezy, chilly day. And, later, downright coolish. That’s the season, and that’s a point we must concede. This comes with this season.

In today’s Criticism in Sport Media, we watched “It’s Time.” Here’s a little clip where Billy Brewer talks about how Chucky Mullins got to Ole Miss.

The problem was that I was able to find nine minutes of the doc to skip, but we just couldn’t cut out anything else out and keep the story together. So it ran the whole class. But this will be an interesting experiment. What will the class say when we talk about it on Tuesday?

In my org comm class we talked about different types of conflict, the way behaviorists used to see it, the way we view it today, the structural and contextual factors that create it, and why it is sometimes good.

And then we played a bit of the prisoner’s dilemma. I broke the class into two groups and sent one of them outside. This group played as the Las Vegas Raiders. The other group played as the Los Angeles Chargers. I told them each the circumstance. Last game of the season, if you win, you make it to the NFL playoffs and the other team goes home. If the two teams tie you both make it to the playoffs. What do you do?

I made the groups argue this out separately amongst themselves. I brought them back together to reveal the choices they’d made. This scenario actually happened a few years ago, and some of them actually remembered it, which made the internal conflict a little more interesting. Ultimately, though, both sides decided to play for the win.

This is how it played out in real life.

So one group won, basically. One student rightly noticed that if both groups had been left in the room they could have figured this out. But that’s the prisoner’s dilemma for you.

It’s an applied approach to understanding people and groups, this class, you see.

I took a grad school class with a guy who literally wrote the book on game theory. (There are about 6,000 books on game theory, to be sure.) He talked about it for an entire semester. And so, today, I was laughing to myself about his many ridiculous stories.

After class we went over the river. Had dinner at McGillins the oldest Irish pub in the city. The food was not the best I’ve had at an Irish pub, but the experience was fine. It was just up the street from the venue where we saw.

He does laugh funny.

It’s all one-liners and bawdy dark comedy. He does a lot of good crowd work. And he laughs funny.

Then every now and again he’ll do something very thoughtful, almost philosophical, which gives away the other nonsense. The problem with one-liners, though, is that they’re almost immediately forgotten. But the laughs remain! Even the funny ones.

photo / Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
30
Oct 25

Ethics always saves the day

A full afternoon of classes. In my criticism class we watched three short pieces. Usually, on Thursdays, we settle in for a long documentary, but I wanted to try a few shorter packages. We talk about specific themes in all of these programs, but I wanted to hopefully make a point about how stories get necessarily compressed, and what might be accentuated, or omitted, in these shorter pieces.

So we started with Chris Nikic making history in Florida.

That one worked pretty well. And then we watched this NFL propaganda about new helmet technology, featuring former wide receiver Steve Smith Jr.

I thought that one was interesting because we spent a day earlier this term discussing the NFL’s CTE settlement, via a Washington Post story. It is interesting in a “how it’s done” way, but it is 100 percent a piece intended to make fans feel good about the what the league is doing for player safety. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s not a subtle thing, either.

Then we ended with this public television package trying to understand and explain Philadelphia sports fans.

And that’s where I lost them. Not exactly sure how that happened.

But in org comm we continued our talk about ethics, which is always a really exciting time. Fortunately, we have a big gambling scandal in the NBA to talk about. I had them read this Joon Lee opinion column and we discussed several elements of that. I had them look up a few other interesting points for some more context. We talked about their own impressions about gambling in sport. And then we ran through some different sorts of hypotheticals. They were largely into it, which is a great result in a week when you’re talking about ethics.

In the office, way up high on the sixth floor, I noticed the trees were looking lovely.

Last week might have been the peak leaf turn here. Maybe it is this week. Probably it won’t be next week. Nothing about foliage fits into the old calendars anymore, but admire them when you can. And from above, if at all possible.

And admire Catober, while you’re at it. The month ends tomorrow. (But there will be some too-good-to-omit photos next week for a Catober bonus post.) You can see them all by clicking that link and scrolling through a month of cozy kitty photos.

football / journalism / links / video / Wednesday — Comments Off
29
Oct 25

Today flew by, unnecessarily so

It was a mild day. Just below the seasonal averages, but not bad. No rain. Windy at times. Blustery you might say. Why did I sit in front of a computer all day when there was a day like that, just outside of these windows. Ahh, yes, work.

Tomorrow we will watch three TV-sized packages in my criticism class. It’s a quick nod to how the storytelling must change when you’re more compressed for time than a typical documentary. In org comm we will continue our discussion about ethics, but I’m going to sit back and listen to the class discuss pressing matters of state. Somehow, this all requires planning. Also, I spent the day trying to get ahead of next week’s documentary. There’s a film I want to show that is the runtime of the class. My goal is to leave room to talk about the thing. But I can only really cut about nine minutes out of the film without losing the spirit.

What to do, what to do. I think, what I’ll do, is show it next Thursday and come up with some way for us to talk about it the following Tuesday. On the one hand, there’s more time to consider your thoughts and impressions. On the other hand, that’s Friday, Saturday, Sunday, and Monday to lose all of your thoughts and impressions.

Maybe it can become a writing exercise.

If you are the sort of reader who can never get enough of these sorts of stories, then you, my friend, live in the right era.

Louisiana officials waited months to warn public of whooping cough outbreak:

When there’s an outbreak of a vaccine-preventable disease, state health officials typically take certain steps to alert residents and issue public updates about the growing threat.

That’s standard practice, public health and infectious disease experts told NPR and KFF Health News. The goal is to keep as many other vulnerable people as possible from getting sick and to remind the public about the benefits of vaccinations.

But in Louisiana this year, public health officials appeared not to have followed that playbook during the state’s worst whooping cough outbreak in 35 years.

Whooping cough, also called pertussis, is a highly contagious vaccine-preventable disease that’s particularly dangerous for the youngest infants. It can cause vomiting and trouble breathing, and serious infections can lead to pneumonia, seizures and, rarely, death.

Complete medical disregard for the local community by the health care professionals aside … In the 28th paragraph the NPR affiliate finally gets to, “A spokeswoman did not answer specific questions about the lack of communications but referred to a Sept. 30 post on X by the state surgeon general.”

Which — in a story about time, responsibility, and children — should maybe be in every other paragraph.

Murrow would weep.

Bari Weiss this week clocks up four weeks on the job as chief booker (sorry, editor-in-chief) of CBS News. Breaker hears that she has unimpressed staffers with a series of bold ideas in the 9 am call.

Last week, following the jewel heist at The Louvre, Weiss suggested they interview author Dan Brown. Staffers questioned what expertise in the matter Brown would provide CBS News viewers? Brown is well known as the bestselling author of the 2003 mystery novel, The Da Vinci Code, about a murder at The Louvre.

On Tuesday’s 9 am call, Weiss suggested a story about how people who are scared of climate change aren’t having children. “She is showing her worst self,” one CBS News journalist told Breaker. “People are running to avoid her.”

Pretty regularly now, when Sen. Tommy Tuberville finds a camera, someone comments about the Alabama education system.

I, a product of that system, understand the joke.

Tuberville on Trump's third term: "He might be able to go around the Constitution, but that's up to him."

[image or embed]

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) October 28, 2025 at 4:30 PM

But dear commenter, I need you to know: Tommy Tuberville is from Camden, Arkansas and holds a BS in PE from Southern Arkansas University.

Speaking of Alabama. More than 750,000 Alabamians are enrolled in SNAP — almost 15 percent of the state — including 7,800 who work in grocery stores. But we must also think of the trickle down effects.

The grocers association said any cuts or interruptions to the program could cost Alabama up to $1.7 billion in annual federal funds, resulting in a $2.55 billion economic loss. That would put “rural grocery stores — often the only food source for many communities — at risk of closure,” the association said.

Grocers in Alabama were already warning about the impacts SNAP cuts would have on them when the Big Beautiful Bill was passed in July, cutting $186 billion in funding for the food program.

Jimmy Wright, who owns Wright’s Market in Opelika, told AL.com that about 35% of his customers use SNAP.

“It could have a huge impact on our business,” Wright told AL.com “If business drops by 20%, I can’t cut off 20% of my lights or call my insurance company and tell them I’m going to have to reduce what I pay them to compensate. All that’s left is payroll.”

OK, back to work for me. And, for you? Something more fun than work I hope.

Rowan / Thursday / video — Comments Off
23
Oct 25

Keep your eyes on the scenery and your hand upon the wheel

I got a great deal of work done in the office today. The key was I had a list. The other key was, no one was on our floor during most of the time I was there. The other key was that I had an extra 75 minutes in the office based on how my day was set up. What that really means is that I’m closing in on some of the work that should have been done days ago.

But other work keeps popping up. And student papers. And every other thing. Plus prepping for the next class. Plus remembering the things I’d forgotten.

Right now, at least two things may be considered permanent fixtures on that list.

It’s OK, though. I’m sure next week I’ll have the time to finish those items. This is a thing I’ve said for the last four weeks. Or 12 years, who can really say?

Anyway, in lieu of anything better, I’d like to share with you a few of the lovely views from my drive home from campus. It’s quite the bit of scenery.

Tomorrow, I’m getting these stitches removed from my back, and finding out how many more days I need to take it easy. (I’m pretty much over that, which is always how you know you’ve recovered nicely.) Join me tomorrow for a report from the doctor’s office, won’t you?

But before that, make sure you’re caught up on Catober. Today was Poseidon’s day to look handsome, and he pulled it off easily. But both kitties are giving vibes. Click that link and scroll back to make sure you’ve seen them all.