The Golden Boot is good. You are bad for not liking it.

Hi, things right now are pretty depressing and concerning around campus, but I want to take the time to address something a little more lighthearted that’s been bugging me for years now.

The worst part about Arkansas week isn’t the fact that the Razorbacks treat this as their Super Bowl and always play like it. It used to be the 1:00 Black Friday timeslot, but since that’s been alleviated the mantle has shifted to something else: LSU fans claiming they don’t like the Golden Boot.

Year after year, LSU fans take to Twitter and Facebook to bitch about the trophy. You can almost set a watch to it, and definitely a calendar. They log on and say it’s dumb, oversized, heavy as shit, and since it’s solid gold and less than an inch wide, it could easily slice someone open if were to fall. Which it definitely could, since it’s so heavy that it requires two college football players to carry it gingerly.

I’m not here to to issue any rebuttals to those complaints. They are all true. And that’s exactly why it’s great. Yes, it’s an incredibly dangerous chunk of gold that is carved to be the exact topological maps of Arkansas and Louisiana. It’s incredibly dumb, which makes it the perfect college football rivalry trophy.

The fact of the matter is that LSU doesn’t have any “traditional” rival to steal a trophy from. We don’t have an old civil war cannon that is painted purple and gold after an LSU win over Texas A&M. We don’t play Georgia Tech for a bronzed boot of General Sherman. We don’t have that history. It would be really cool if there was a school in say, New Orleans that we could play for a rivalry trophy split in both our colors, but we don’t have that. It’s a shame, I know.

So we have to force one. And truth be told, if we’re going to force one, the Boot is MUCH preferable to something boring like a Governor’s Cup. And because of the distinct shape of the two states, we don’t have to call it something lame like Border War.

I want to do an exercise right quick.

Georgia and Georgia Tech play for a trophy each year, called the Governors’ Cup. If you don’t know what it looks like, I want you to close your eyes and try to imagine what it looks like, then I want you to click this link. I bet you were pretty close, weren’t you?

I love our big dumb trophy, because it’s exactly as dumb as the LSU-Arkansas rivalry. It’s a perfect marriage, and I love it when LSU players risk possible decapitation to run over and lift this unwieldly beast.

And finally, as our friend of the program succinctly put it:

The Magnolia Bowl trophy sucks though.