When Rivalry Becomes a Test of Virtue

When Lane Kiffin left Ole Miss for LSU last November, I wrote about the reaction primarily as a question of ordered love. His departure had wounded something larger than a football program because college football in the South often carries memories, loyalties, family histories, local identity, and ritual far beyond what appears on a scoreboard. The anger surrounding his departure consequently revealed something about the spiritual weight we sometimes ask sports to carry. Social media filled quickly with accusations, rumors, moral judgments, and language suggesting that a coach changing employers had somehow violated an intimate communal bond. The episode offered a remarkably clear example of Augustine’s ordo amoris: good things become dangerous when they are loved outside their proper order.

Now Kiffin is returning to Oxford wearing LSU colors, and the question has become less abstract. No. 7 LSU will play No. 8 Ole Miss on Saturday night in a game surrounded by an extraordinary degree of attention, emotion, and security preparation. Oxford Police expects crowds larger than some of the city’s busiest recent football weekends. The department is moving to an all-hands operation with extended rotations, additional downtown staffing, traffic personnel, and mounted patrol reinforcements from outside jurisdictions. The number of police horses available for the weekend is expected to increase substantially, while other state and local agencies are coordinating around what officials expect to be an unusually demanding weekend.

From a Catholic perspective, the most striking aspect of this situation is not the number of officers or horses Oxford can muster. It is what happens when a normally good human activity acquires enough emotional force that legitimate authority has to prepare for passion escaping the governance of reason. Football, rivalry, loyalty, tradition, and communal celebration are genuine goods. Catholic thought has no reason to treat intense athletic competition as inherently suspect. The Church’s own document on sport, Giving the Best of Yourself, describes competition as a cooperative search for excellence in which opponents participate together within agreed rules. It even points to the Latin roots of competition, com and petere, conveying the idea of striving together rather than seeking the destruction of an enemy.

That understanding gives us a useful way to interpret Oxford’s security preparations. The Catechism teaches that legitimate authority serves the common good, including what it calls the “stability and security of a just order” (CCC 1905–1912). Oxford authorities are therefore responsible for far more than Lane Kiffin. Their responsibility extends to LSU players, Ole Miss players, students, families, police officers, local workers, visiting supporters, pedestrians, residents, and people with no interest in football who happen to share the city with the event. Preparing for crowd density, alcohol consumption, traffic congestion, emotional hostility, and the movement of tens of thousands of people is an ordinary exercise of prudence made unusual by scale.

Aquinas described prudence as recta ratio agibilium, right reason applied to action. Prudence neither panics at every possible danger nor waits until preventable danger has become catastrophe. Authorities do not need evidence of a planned attack before preparing for predictable crowd problems any more than a stadium requires smoke before establishing evacuation procedures. The relevant moral question concerns proportionality: whether precautions reasonably correspond to foreseeable conditions while leaving peaceful people free to participate in a legitimate public activity.

Sports history gives authorities good reason to take that responsibility seriously. At the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus at Heysel Stadium in Brussels, thirty-nine spectators died after crowd violence produced a fatal crush against a retaining wall. UEFA’s historical review of the security failures later described divided police responsibility, inadequate staffing, insufficient reserves, and an operational plan unable to adapt as conditions deteriorated. The tragedy remains a sobering example of how public authority can fail not only through excessive coercion but through inadequate preparation and confused responsibility.

The 2018 Copa Libertadores final between Boca Juniors and River Plate offers a different example. The Buenos Aires rivals were supposed to decide South America’s premier club competition in Argentina, but violence surrounding Boca’s team bus forced repeated postponements before the decisive match was transferred across the Atlantic to Madrid. Spanish authorities mounted an enormous security operation around the relocated match. In practical terms, the community that had created one of the world’s great sporting rivalries temporarily lost the ability to host its greatest expression safely.

Scotland provides an even more instructive case for Catholics because the Celtic–Rangers rivalry has historically carried religious and political associations alongside football allegiance. Scottish research has repeatedly warned against treating modern Celtic supporters as simply Catholic or Rangers supporters as simply Protestant; contemporary Scotland is much more socially integrated and religiously complex than such stereotypes suggest. At the same time, the rivalry has long shown how songs, flags, colors, public spaces, and alcohol can become vehicles through which older antagonisms are preserved or revived.

No reasonable comparison should pretend that LSU–Ole Miss carries the sectarian history of Celtic–Rangers or the record of violence surrounding Boca–River. Oxford is dealing with a substantially different cultural situation. The value of the comparison lies in the common human pattern beneath each case. Communities attach identity to sport; identity generates loyalty; loyalty produces powerful emotion; and powerful emotion requires formation if competition is to remain compatible with reason, justice, and charity.

This is where Augustine becomes especially useful. Ordo amoris does not require that people stop loving football intensely. It asks whether that love occupies its proper place among greater goods. Tradition is good, local loyalty is good, winning is good, shared memory is good, and even the emotional sting of losing someone to a rival can be perfectly human. Trouble begins when preserving those goods seems more important than the dignity of another person. Once humiliating, threatening, or physically intimidating a coach appears justified because he changed schools, loyalty has begun demanding sacrifices that no sporting allegiance deserves.

Alcohol can make the failure of interior order more visible. Catholicism does not condemn drinking, but the Catechism condemns excess when intoxication places oneself or others in danger (CCC 2290). That principle is especially relevant in dense sporting crowds because individual temperance becomes part of public safety. One person who would ordinarily ignore an insult responds after several drinks; another answers; someone pushes; spectators gather; and police suddenly inherit a confrontation no participant planned when the evening began. What sounds like private moral formation therefore carries a civic consequence. Self-government reduces the amount of government required.

The same principle applies well beyond sports. Political rallies, concerts, demonstrations, parades, pilgrimages, and religious festivals all gather large numbers of people around shared emotions and symbols. A crowd can magnify gratitude, reverence, joy, anger, fear, or resentment because human beings respond to one another. A person surrounded by thousands chanting the same words experiences something quite different from quietly holding the same opinion at home. Catholic tradition has long understood this social dimension of the person, which is one reason religious life contains processions, pilgrimages, communal prayer, sacred music, fasting, feasting, and liturgical calendars. Strong collective feeling does not inevitably lead toward disorder. Culture, leadership, ritual, and virtue help determine where that feeling goes.

Modern rivalry also begins long before anyone walks through the stadium gate because the digital crowd gathers first. My earlier essay on Kiffin’s departure examined how quickly rumor, accusation, and moral condemnation spread after his announcement. The Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication has described a broader version of the same phenomenon in Towards Full Presence. Algorithms tend to place people among others sharing their existing preferences, while aggressive speech, misinformation, and rapid reactions can flourish inside those enclosed communities. The document warns specifically about “digital tribalism,” in which belonging develops around opposition to an external group.

Sports culture provides almost perfect conditions for this temptation because tribal affiliation is built into the experience. A provocative post from an Ole Miss supporter can circulate through LSU accounts within seconds. A clip stripped of context can become evidence that “their fans” are contemptible. An isolated comment can be presented as representative of an entire university. Humor grows harsher because harshness produces engagement, and digital applause rewards the supporter who demonstrates the greatest hostility toward the rival. By Saturday afternoon, people who have never met may have spent an entire week training one another to experience the opposing fan base as an abstraction rather than as actual people.

The solution cannot be a humorless rivalry scrubbed clean of teasing, exaggeration, or partisan absurdity. An Ole Miss supporter should remain free to believe that LSU’s football program represents a regrettable error in the history of higher education, and LSU supporters can presumably return the compliment. Sports would lose some of their charm if every rivalry became an exchange of carefully moderated compliments. Charity demands something more difficult than politeness: maintaining the humanity of the person one mocks.

This gives Catholic leaders an opportunity that should extend beyond generic appeals for good behavior. Priests, campus ministers, Catholic coaches, parish leaders, and Catholic student organizations can use rivalry weekends as occasions for moral formation precisely because people already care so much. A priest near Oxford does not need to deliver a homily explaining whether Catholics may boo LSU. He can remind people that temperance still applies at a tailgate, truthfulness remains binding on social media, and charity survives kickoff. Catholic campus ministries from rival schools can share Mass, a meal, a charitable project, or prayer before spending the evening hoping earnestly that the other side loses.

Such gestures need not dissolve rivalry into sentimentality. Their power comes from preserving the rivalry while placing it inside a larger communion. Two Catholics can want opposite results with complete sincerity while still receiving the same Eucharist. They can sing different fight songs while professing the same Creed. They can argue about a targeting call for twenty years without allowing that disagreement to become a moral category by which one decides whether the other person deserves respect.

The rituals surrounding sport are important here because rituals form people. College football understands this better than many institutions do. The marching band, school colors, tailgate, chants, fight song, pregame entrance, alumni traditions, mascots, and inherited stories teach supporters what belonging feels like through the body as much as through the intellect. Celtic–Rangers history demonstrates the darker side of that power: songs, colors, tunes, and flags can carry meanings capable of preserving older social antagonisms long after many participants have forgotten their origin.

Catholics should readily understand why ritual possesses such formative force. Human beings learn through repeated embodied practices. What we sing repeatedly, celebrate annually, honor publicly, and perform together slowly forms our imagination. There is no equivalence between the sacred liturgy and a football game, but the same embodied human person participates in both. A tradition can teach gratitude, continuity, hospitality, courage, and belonging, or it can teach that authentic membership requires contempt for outsiders. Communities therefore inherit customs from previous generations while retaining responsibility for deciding which customs deserve another generation.

That is also why public rhetoric deserves scrutiny this week. Language does not merely describe the emotional atmosphere surrounding an event; it contributes to that atmosphere. Talk of war, invasion, enemies, revenge, betrayal, and hatred is generally understood as sporting metaphor, but metaphors repeated often enough can form habits of imagination. The Epistle of James compares the tongue to a small fire capable of setting a forest ablaze. In an age when a sentence can travel among hundreds of thousands of people before its author has finished dinner, that warning has acquired technological assistance.

The Catholic ideal for Oxford this weekend is therefore more ambitious than simply avoiding arrests. A healthy rivalry should permit enormous passion while preserving proportion. Ole Miss supporters can resent Kiffin’s departure, LSU supporters can celebrate his arrival, the Grove can be loud, the stadium can be hostile, the boos can be thunderous, and the game can carry genuine emotional weight. None of those reactions requires forgetting that the people wearing the other colors remain neighbors.

Perhaps the most successful security operation will be one that seems excessive in retrospect because very little happens. That would not demonstrate that authorities were foolish to prepare. It would suggest that institutional prudence and personal virtue worked together: police anticipated foreseeable danger while citizens governed themselves well enough that intervention remained limited. Heysel shows the terrible cost of failed preparation, Boca–River shows what can happen when a community temporarily loses the ability to contain its own rivalry, and Celtic–Rangers shows how inherited identities can continue flowing through sporting rituals long after their original social setting has changed.

Oxford has an opportunity to offer a less dramatic example. A community can love its team fiercely without allowing that love to become hatred. It can preserve ritual without turning ritual into tribal contempt. It can welcome passion without worshiping passion, maintain public order without suffocating freedom, and use authority as a safeguard rather than a substitute for virtue. The deepest measure of the weekend will therefore not be how many troopers were required or how many mounted officers stood watch. It will be whether tens of thousands of people can care profoundly about something good while remembering that it is still a lesser good.

That was ultimately the concern beneath my reflection when Kiffin left Oxford last December, and his return makes the question harder to avoid. Communities reveal the order of their loves not only through what they celebrate, but through how they behave when something they love has disappointed them, wounded them, or returned wearing the colors of a rival. Football gives Oxford the stage this weekend, but the test itself is far older than football: whether passion will remain the servant of reason, justice, temperance, and charity, or whether the crowd will ask passion to rule.

As for the football itself, after all the moral analysis, historical comparisons, security preparations, and talk about ordered passions, somebody still has to win the game. My prediction is that LSU walks out of Oxford with the victory, 34–24, winning by ten points and leaving everyone else to argue about the rivalry until the next time these two programs meet.

Abstract: Lane Kiffin’s return to Oxford in LSU colors is more than a dramatic college football storyline. It is a revealing test of what happens when loyalty, memory, pride, disappointment, and rivalry all gather in one place. This essay argues that sports can unite communities, preserve tradition, and give people something joyful to love–but only when passion remains ordered by reason, temperance, justice, and charity. Oxford’s heightened security preparations show how easily intense public emotion can become a civic concern, while examples from Heysel, Boca–River, and Celtic–Rangers remind us that rivalry can strengthen identity or distort it into contempt. From a Catholic perspective, the issue is not whether fans should care deeply. They should. The deeper question is whether they can love their team fiercely without forgetting the dignity of the people wearing the other colors.

When Lane Kiffin left Ole Miss for LSU last November, I wrote about the reaction primarily as a question of ordered love. His departure had wounded something larger than a football program because college football in the South often carries memories, loyalties, family histories, local identity, and ritual far beyond what appears on a scoreboard. The anger surrounding his departure consequently revealed something about the spiritual weight we sometimes ask sports to carry. Social media filled quickly with accusations, rumors, moral judgments, and language suggesting that a coach changing employers had somehow violated an intimate communal bond. The episode offered a remarkably clear example of Augustine’s ordo amoris: good things become dangerous when they are loved outside their proper order.

Now Kiffin is returning to Oxford wearing LSU colors, and the question has become less abstract. No. 7 LSU will play No. 8 Ole Miss on Saturday night in a game surrounded by an extraordinary degree of attention, emotion, and security preparation. Oxford Police expects crowds larger than some of the city’s busiest recent football weekends. The department is moving to an all-hands operation with extended rotations, additional downtown staffing, traffic personnel, and mounted patrol reinforcements from outside jurisdictions. The number of police horses available for the weekend is expected to increase substantially, while other state and local agencies are coordinating around what officials expect to be an unusually demanding weekend.

From a Catholic perspective, the most striking aspect of this situation is not the number of officers or horses Oxford can muster. It is what happens when a normally good human activity acquires enough emotional force that legitimate authority has to prepare for passion escaping the governance of reason. Football, rivalry, loyalty, tradition, and communal celebration are genuine goods. Catholic thought has no reason to treat intense athletic competition as inherently suspect. The Church’s own document on sport, Giving the Best of Yourself, describes competition as a cooperative search for excellence in which opponents participate together within agreed rules. It even points to the Latin roots of competition, com and petere, conveying the idea of striving together rather than seeking the destruction of an enemy.

That understanding gives us a useful way to interpret Oxford’s security preparations. The Catechism teaches that legitimate authority serves the common good, including what it calls the “stability and security of a just order” (CCC 1905–1912). Oxford authorities are therefore responsible for far more than Lane Kiffin. Their responsibility extends to LSU players, Ole Miss players, students, families, police officers, local workers, visiting supporters, pedestrians, residents, and people with no interest in football who happen to share the city with the event. Preparing for crowd density, alcohol consumption, traffic congestion, emotional hostility, and the movement of tens of thousands of people is an ordinary exercise of prudence made unusual by scale.

Aquinas described prudence as recta ratio agibilium, right reason applied to action. Prudence neither panics at every possible danger nor waits until preventable danger has become catastrophe. Authorities do not need evidence of a planned attack before preparing for predictable crowd problems any more than a stadium requires smoke before establishing evacuation procedures. The relevant moral question concerns proportionality: whether precautions reasonably correspond to foreseeable conditions while leaving peaceful people free to participate in a legitimate public activity.

Sports history gives authorities good reason to take that responsibility seriously. At the 1985 European Cup final between Liverpool and Juventus at Heysel Stadium in Brussels, thirty-nine spectators died after crowd violence produced a fatal crush against a retaining wall. UEFA’s historical review of the security failures later described divided police responsibility, inadequate staffing, insufficient reserves, and an operational plan unable to adapt as conditions deteriorated. The tragedy remains a sobering example of how public authority can fail not only through excessive coercion but through inadequate preparation and confused responsibility.

The 2018 Copa Libertadores final between Boca Juniors and River Plate offers a different example. The Buenos Aires rivals were supposed to decide South America’s premier club competition in Argentina, but violence surrounding Boca’s team bus forced repeated postponements before the decisive match was transferred across the Atlantic to Madrid. Spanish authorities mounted an enormous security operation around the relocated match. In practical terms, the community that had created one of the world’s great sporting rivalries temporarily lost the ability to host its greatest expression safely.

Scotland provides an even more instructive case for Catholics because the Celtic–Rangers rivalry has historically carried religious and political associations alongside football allegiance. Scottish research has repeatedly warned against treating modern Celtic supporters as simply Catholic or Rangers supporters as simply Protestant; contemporary Scotland is much more socially integrated and religiously complex than such stereotypes suggest. At the same time, the rivalry has long shown how songs, flags, colors, public spaces, and alcohol can become vehicles through which older antagonisms are preserved or revived.

No reasonable comparison should pretend that LSU–Ole Miss carries the sectarian history of Celtic–Rangers or the record of violence surrounding Boca–River. Oxford is dealing with a substantially different cultural situation. The value of the comparison lies in the common human pattern beneath each case. Communities attach identity to sport; identity generates loyalty; loyalty produces powerful emotion; and powerful emotion requires formation if competition is to remain compatible with reason, justice, and charity.

This is where Augustine becomes especially useful. Ordo amoris does not require that people stop loving football intensely. It asks whether that love occupies its proper place among greater goods. Tradition is good, local loyalty is good, winning is good, shared memory is good, and even the emotional sting of losing someone to a rival can be perfectly human. Trouble begins when preserving those goods seems more important than the dignity of another person. Once humiliating, threatening, or physically intimidating a coach appears justified because he changed schools, loyalty has begun demanding sacrifices that no sporting allegiance deserves.

Alcohol can make the failure of interior order more visible. Catholicism does not condemn drinking, but the Catechism condemns excess when intoxication places oneself or others in danger (CCC 2290). That principle is especially relevant in dense sporting crowds because individual temperance becomes part of public safety. One person who would ordinarily ignore an insult responds after several drinks; another answers; someone pushes; spectators gather; and police suddenly inherit a confrontation no participant planned when the evening began. What sounds like private moral formation therefore carries a civic consequence. Self-government reduces the amount of government required.

The same principle applies well beyond sports. Political rallies, concerts, demonstrations, parades, pilgrimages, and religious festivals all gather large numbers of people around shared emotions and symbols. A crowd can magnify gratitude, reverence, joy, anger, fear, or resentment because human beings respond to one another. A person surrounded by thousands chanting the same words experiences something quite different from quietly holding the same opinion at home. Catholic tradition has long understood this social dimension of the person, which is one reason religious life contains processions, pilgrimages, communal prayer, sacred music, fasting, feasting, and liturgical calendars. Strong collective feeling does not inevitably lead toward disorder. Culture, leadership, ritual, and virtue help determine where that feeling goes.

Modern rivalry also begins long before anyone walks through the stadium gate because the digital crowd gathers first. My earlier essay on Kiffin’s departure examined how quickly rumor, accusation, and moral condemnation spread after his announcement. The Vatican’s Dicastery for Communication has described a broader version of the same phenomenon in Towards Full Presence. Algorithms tend to place people among others sharing their existing preferences, while aggressive speech, misinformation, and rapid reactions can flourish inside those enclosed communities. The document warns specifically about “digital tribalism,” in which belonging develops around opposition to an external group.

Sports culture provides almost perfect conditions for this temptation because tribal affiliation is built into the experience. A provocative post from an Ole Miss supporter can circulate through LSU accounts within seconds. A clip stripped of context can become evidence that “their fans” are contemptible. An isolated comment can be presented as representative of an entire university. Humor grows harsher because harshness produces engagement, and digital applause rewards the supporter who demonstrates the greatest hostility toward the rival. By Saturday afternoon, people who have never met may have spent an entire week training one another to experience the opposing fan base as an abstraction rather than as actual people.

The solution cannot be a humorless rivalry scrubbed clean of teasing, exaggeration, or partisan absurdity. An Ole Miss supporter should remain free to believe that LSU’s football program represents a regrettable error in the history of higher education, and LSU supporters can presumably return the compliment. Sports would lose some of their charm if every rivalry became an exchange of carefully moderated compliments. Charity demands something more difficult than politeness: maintaining the humanity of the person one mocks.

This gives Catholic leaders an opportunity that should extend beyond generic appeals for good behavior. Priests, campus ministers, Catholic coaches, parish leaders, and Catholic student organizations can use rivalry weekends as occasions for moral formation precisely because people already care so much. A priest near Oxford does not need to deliver a homily explaining whether Catholics may boo LSU. He can remind people that temperance still applies at a tailgate, truthfulness remains binding on social media, and charity survives kickoff. Catholic campus ministries from rival schools can share Mass, a meal, a charitable project, or prayer before spending the evening hoping earnestly that the other side loses.

Such gestures need not dissolve rivalry into sentimentality. Their power comes from preserving the rivalry while placing it inside a larger communion. Two Catholics can want opposite results with complete sincerity while still receiving the same Eucharist. They can sing different fight songs while professing the same Creed. They can argue about a targeting call for twenty years without allowing that disagreement to become a moral category by which one decides whether the other person deserves respect.

The rituals surrounding sport are important here because rituals form people. College football understands this better than many institutions do. The marching band, school colors, tailgate, chants, fight song, pregame entrance, alumni traditions, mascots, and inherited stories teach supporters what belonging feels like through the body as much as through the intellect. Celtic–Rangers history demonstrates the darker side of that power: songs, colors, tunes, and flags can carry meanings capable of preserving older social antagonisms long after many participants have forgotten their origin.

Catholics should readily understand why ritual possesses such formative force. Human beings learn through repeated embodied practices. What we sing repeatedly, celebrate annually, honor publicly, and perform together slowly forms our imagination. There is no equivalence between the sacred liturgy and a football game, but the same embodied human person participates in both. A tradition can teach gratitude, continuity, hospitality, courage, and belonging, or it can teach that authentic membership requires contempt for outsiders. Communities therefore inherit customs from previous generations while retaining responsibility for deciding which customs deserve another generation.

That is also why public rhetoric deserves scrutiny this week. Language does not merely describe the emotional atmosphere surrounding an event; it contributes to that atmosphere. Talk of war, invasion, enemies, revenge, betrayal, and hatred is generally understood as sporting metaphor, but metaphors repeated often enough can form habits of imagination. The Epistle of James compares the tongue to a small fire capable of setting a forest ablaze. In an age when a sentence can travel among hundreds of thousands of people before its author has finished dinner, that warning has acquired technological assistance.

The Catholic ideal for Oxford this weekend is therefore more ambitious than simply avoiding arrests. A healthy rivalry should permit enormous passion while preserving proportion. Ole Miss supporters can resent Kiffin’s departure, LSU supporters can celebrate his arrival, the Grove can be loud, the stadium can be hostile, the boos can be thunderous, and the game can carry genuine emotional weight. None of those reactions requires forgetting that the people wearing the other colors remain neighbors.

Perhaps the most successful security operation will be one that seems excessive in retrospect because very little happens. That would not demonstrate that authorities were foolish to prepare. It would suggest that institutional prudence and personal virtue worked together: police anticipated foreseeable danger while citizens governed themselves well enough that intervention remained limited. Heysel shows the terrible cost of failed preparation, Boca–River shows what can happen when a community temporarily loses the ability to contain its own rivalry, and Celtic–Rangers shows how inherited identities can continue flowing through sporting rituals long after their original social setting has changed.

Oxford has an opportunity to offer a less dramatic example. A community can love its team fiercely without allowing that love to become hatred. It can preserve ritual without turning ritual into tribal contempt. It can welcome passion without worshiping passion, maintain public order without suffocating freedom, and use authority as a safeguard rather than a substitute for virtue. The deepest measure of the weekend will therefore not be how many troopers were required or how many mounted officers stood watch. It will be whether tens of thousands of people can care profoundly about something good while remembering that it is still a lesser good.

That was ultimately the concern beneath my reflection when Kiffin left Oxford last December, and his return makes the question harder to avoid. Communities reveal the order of their loves not only through what they celebrate, but through how they behave when something they love has disappointed them, wounded them, or returned wearing the colors of a rival. Football gives Oxford the stage this weekend, but the test itself is far older than football: whether passion will remain the servant of reason, justice, temperance, and charity, or whether the crowd will ask passion to rule.

As for the football itself, after all the moral analysis, historical comparisons, security preparations, and talk about ordered passions, somebody still has to win the game. My prediction is that LSU walks out of Oxford with the victory, 34–24, winning by ten points and leaving everyone else to argue about the rivalry until the next time these two programs meet.