LET’S TALK ABOUT THAT SEC COMMERCIAL

The SEC’s tagline this year, “It Just Means More,” has an accompanying ad campaign. This is one of those ads. We’re going to talk about it, because oh dear, there are so many things to talk about in just a minute of video that doesn’t feature one kinda racist gameday banner hanging off an LSU frat house balcony.

All of these ads put Wynn Everett in some fantastical location you cannot afford, but stop to take family photos at on the way to the place you actually can afford.

In this case it’s probably somewhere along Grayton Beach in the Florida panhandle, where you stop before checking in at a tiny, cramped condo a few miles down the road in Destin. The Bass Pro Shops there is massive, y’all, and the kids can run around it for hours! This is actually true, don’t sleep on the value of just turning your savage kids loose in a Bass Pro Shops or Cabela’s for a few hours when you get tired of thinking of ways to amuse them.

I vow this: I cannot stop talking and will not stop talking about the hilarity of Americans doing this without thinking about what they’re doing, and just going “well we’re at the beach, let’s wear white clothes and take a family photo because the Fergusons had one, and dammit I guess that’s what people do to show how rich and clean they are.”

Maybe going to the beach shows you’re wealthy, which you’re probably not. Maybe wearing white shows you’re clean, which you’re definitely not, especially if you’re an SEC fan. It’s dirty here, the plants are poisonous and leave stains and are absolutely everywhere. The mildew is so, so real. All-white clothing in the south is for the institutionalized, drunken wealthy eccentrics, rapper shooting a “WE MADE IT” video, or for certain social clubs exclusively favoring the “economically anxious.”

The point: Stop taking the Hamptons photo when you vacation in Okaloosa County. Take an honest family portrait in the parking lot of a Pensacola Publix and live your truth. Save your lies for Facebook and be free.

2.

The image of LSU is a chemistry lab where the lights are off due to lack of state funding. We have no problem with the accuracy of this image, let’s keep going.

That’s not a member of Alabama’s gymnastics team. That’s Vanessa, an ordinary sophomore majoring in anthropology, up at 4:30 in the morning not because she wants to but because Nick Saban requires every student on campus to be part of the strength and conditioning program. You may be listed as the 1,857th free safety on the depth chart, Vanessa. But you’re on the damn depth chart.

This is also accurate since Vanderbilt is in Nashville, and nothing says Vanderbilt or Nashville more than “I have spent thousands of dollars to train my child in a dead but prestigious discipline like opera singing or climbing the social ladder at an expensive private institution.”

Also never forget that Vanderbilt is for the wealthy, who do not pay taxes. No one in the SEC pays taxes, mind you, but Vandy people don’t pay them for the wrong reasons. They do it as a tax sheltering strategy, not because they’re still mad the ATF shot their great-uncle for keeping a still in Blount County.

You gotta get audited for the right reasons, Bubba, and not because you paid someone to set up a Panamanian shell corporation for your opera-singing daughter’s inheritance.

“It’s the Sound...and the Fury.” Just dropping a reference to a novel about suicide, incest, racism, and nihilistic alcoholism when you show the Ole Miss image. That’s also accurate, we have no objections to this, or to Ole Miss students stealing sips of William Faulkner’s bottles of booze on display at Rowan Oak.

Let’s come back to Wynn. She is an actor picking up a check here and huzzah for that. This is not aimed at her, but at the character, who’s clearly supposed to be something representative of the conference. Rephrase: who’s clearly supposed to be something an SEC fan would believe their conference to be.

I have never seen this person at an SEC tailgate or at a game. If you boiled the SEC down to its spirit lady, it would not be a tiny blonde lady in a white dress reciting Pinterest poetry on the beach while wearing a white dress.

The more representative person would be the LSU mom I saw—probably around forty-five, definitely drunk but managing it well, and wearing a visor and a yellow LSU golf shirt—screaming at the Tiger defense to kneecap Cam Newton in front of her horrified son during the Auburn game in 2010.

That woman keeps this conference alive. She brings three pounds of Popeyes to the tailgate. She has bourbon somewhere in the car and maybe carries a gun—or at least wants you to think she carries a gun.

Her son is kind of embarrassed and terrified/proud of her and will be for life. He will marry someone either exactly like her, or categorically opposite of her. Either way, mom will hate her to the marrow, even when daughter-in-law sends well-composed shots of the family wearing all-white on the beach.

She does not care what her son says: sportsmanship is for baseball. She wants you to break that man’s leg because he does not play for the Tigers. She doesn’t know what her husband’s doing right now, and doesn’t care because that man hasn’t mowed the yard in three months, and she’s getting better at it anyway.

No, she doesn’t know where Randy is either. If you find him tell him he owes her forty bucks for gas and beer. Worthless man. Absolutely worthless.

That woman, and multiple variations thereof, is the SEC’s female avatar. The It Just Means More Lady was an acceptable villain on Agent Carter for a season, and wanders state parks reciting ad copy. She is not the lady-genie you get when you rub the magical Coleman Camping Lantern buried deep within a hillside vault in Birmingham that contains the spirit of the SEC.

“It’s...geography.” South Carolina gets two golf references. This is appropriate, though it’s also very SEC to suggest that golf courses are some kind of organically created landscape because it’s a.) grossly inaccurate, and b.) could be used as an argument for some kind of conservation trust-based fraud when a legislator gets them classified as protected wetlands.

The water hazard on seventeen at Boonwaggle Plantation Run is an endangered heron nesting area, and don’t you tell Representative Kayden Whitley from Moncks Corner any different. He’s trying to be an environmentalist, dammit.

(The accompanying neighborhood is called The Villas at Boonwaggle. HOA rules state “no families with kids in public school allowed.”)

Oh man, this is the scariest part.

First, that’s a Southern judge, you should already be terrified. He probably went to law school somewhere where they like to say things like “property is the only Constitutional basis of citizenship” and “the Founders didn’t believe in the right not to be torn apart by donkeys for stealing a spoon.” This judge has sent eight year olds to adult prison and then played eighteen that day without blinking. This judge wears a Santa Suit on Christmas Eve and fools everyone into thinking he’ll sentence gently that day.

SPOILER: He does not.

But then it gets scarier:

For the record: If I wind up in any trial situation and see that the judge has an SEC logo on their sound block, I am trying to grab the bailiff’s gun and committing suicide by cop—or by judge, actually, since a lot of judges carry under their robes. Not all of them, but definitely a judge with an SEC logo somewhere on the podium, because they wakes up wanting to shoot someone.

You’re already a dead man at that point, and not even Face Tat Lawyer can save you from a judge thinking quietly about how pisspoor the Razorbacks defense was this year. They’ll be mad and you’ll be in jail for ten years for simple securities fraud. Maybe five if you’re buddies—if you’re committing securities fraud in Arkansas you’re definitely buddies with a judge, or are a judge yourself.

Please do not tell us who this judge actually is because he is probably scarier in real life than he could ever be on paper.

Kentucky gets horses. What more can you know about horses at this point? They’re not that hard. Equine Research should be a finite science at this point. The discoveries at this point can only be things like “oh wow, no, you thought it was this one, but it’s this kind of plastic grocery bag that REALLY freaks the hell out of this giant, dumb, and perpetually terrified animal.”

The Auburn School of Dessert Torture is one of the nation’s best.

Georgia’s imagery focuses on their history. Bold move, but shouts out to Eugene Talmadge anyway. GO DAWGS.

The judge is the most terrifying part of this ad. The second most terrifying part of it are a bunch of dudes from Mississippi with a rocket in their hands.

The SEC putting out an ad that makes Florida a baseball school pisses off Gator fans AND LSU fans simultaneously. This may be the only truly SEC part of this ad, so well done.

The final thing we’ll say about this: It’s a great Southern Living ad, and no one can take that away from it. Subscribe now and receive floorplans for houses your parents thought about building and three recipes for pecan pie you won’t use because buying one in the store is way, way easier than actually making a mediocre one of your own. Buying it at the grocery store because IT JUST MEANS MORE. Nothing more SEC than that, y’all.