Southerners win Sudler Award

I've railed against the Sudler on MULTIPLE occasions in the past. (Sometimes online, an awful lot of times offline.)

On a strictly personal level, my respect for the trophy is every bit where you'd expect it to be for a trophy that 1) theoretically, everyone will eventually win, making it a participation trophy requiring only patience, and 2) has a selection process so mired in politics that Auburn won this thing only a year after Bama, and nearly 20 years before JSU, despite the fact that -- at the time they won -- Auburn's band was a bag of excrement. (They're actually pretty good nowadays. All the props to Dr. Spurlin for turning the program around.)

THAT SAID ... I do see this as a well-deserved honor for the Southerners. We won it before about 60 P5 schools and nearly the same number of G5 schools. Of particular note, we won it before UNA. We won it before SOTS. We won it before Indiana-Pennsylvania. We won it before Texas State. (They used to have a screaming program in their FCS days.) We won it before North Texas. (Not that great a marching band, but easily the top marching percussion studio in America.) We won it before Tennessee. We won it before FSU. We won it before Southern Cal. All of those will eventually win it. (It may take awhile for UNA and troy state.)

So now that we've won the trophy, I'm going to loft it high over my head and pretend it's the greatest trophy ever and is undeniable proof of our dominance over programs which haven't won it.

Kidding.

I do feel honored to have played a small part in JSU winning it (as has every other alumnus and alumna out there, since it's theoretically based on a HISTORY of excellence, and our history goes back to 1956). The Sudler is something to be (reasonably) proud of, and it's about damn time we won it. Now, I guess, we can move on to more important goals. Like reminding other college marching bands who their daddy is.