EYDER PERALTA, HOST:
Rise and shine, college football fans. It's conference championship day across the country. Hope you have your lucky T-shirts and talismans ready to go because it's time to do your part. Melanie Peeples reports from Alabama as the Crimson Tide gets ready to take on the University of Georgia Bulldogs today in the SEC championship game.
MELANIE PEEPLES: Game days in the fall always start the same in Sean Malone's (ph) house.
(SOUNDBITE OF SONG, "CIRCLE OF LIFE")
LEBO M: (Singing) Nants ingonyama bagithi baba.
PEEPLES: Playing the "Lion King" theme song is just something he started doing when he was a student at the University of Georgia and continues to this day. It's more ritual than anything else, but he's not above superstition when it comes to what the Bulldogs wear.
SEAN MALONE: Every time they talk about the black jerseys might be coming out, I get a little scared. I don't want them.
PEEPLES: See, back in 2008, Georgia wore black jerseys against Alabama and asked their fans to do the same. Leading up to the game, Alabama coaches even used it to hype up their players at practice in Tuscaloosa.
(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)
SCOTT COCHRAN: It don't get any better.
PEEPLES: This video of conditioning coach Scott Cochran went viral when he said Georgia's wearing black to their own bleeping funeral, and Georgia lost. Seventeen years later, Georgia still has not worn black jerseys against Alabama. Alabama fan Amy Duncan (ph) starts her game days with a cup of coffee in her Crimson mug. This season, there were two games she forgot the special cup, and guess what? Those are Alabama's only losses this year. She's deeply apologetic.
AMY DUNCAN: You know, life - things happen, I guess. You know, I'm trying to keep my priorities straight during football season along with everything else. I just - it's just hard to do some days.
PEEPLES: But she's more than willing to make up for it by staying put when things are going well - like that one time, she and her friends were in a bar watching the game when she had to go to the bathroom.
DUNCAN: As soon as I went in there, I heard the bar just erupt in cheers and my friend beating on the door, saying, don't come out of there. Trent Richardson just scored. Don't come out of there. So it's just a thing across the board that you just stay put until something else happens.
PEEPLES: It goes without saying the opposite must also be true. Take Ginger Shofner (ph), a Bama fan who lives in Tennessee. If the team is not doing well, she has to leave her home. It started in 2016 in a game against Ole Miss. Alabama was behind at halftime, and the thought of losing to Ole Miss was just too much.
GINGER SHOFNER: I was like, I am going to need a drink to get through the second half of this ball game. And like any good Tennessean, I had Jack Daniels in my house, but I had no coke. And I was like, I've got to have a Jack and Coke.
PEEPLES: So she got in her car and drove to the Dairy Queen.
SHOFNER: And so by the time I got home from making that run to get that Coke, we had scored.
PEEPLES: She told family and friends about it, and ever since, if the team's not playing well, she gets texts from everyone telling her it's time to make the Dairy Queen run, and so she does. Some people might say these superstitions are crazy or embarrassing, but not University of Miami sports scientist Tywan Martin.
TYWAN MARTIN: Embrace it.
PEEPLES: Martin says these game rituals are a way for people to feel part of something bigger.
MARTIN: The fans are playing their part, and that energetic force, that energetic pull, is absolutely serving a purpose to elevate the team that they cheer for.
PEEPLES: Like they say, it's only crazy if it doesn't work.
For NPR News, I'm Melanie Peeples.
(SOUNDBITE OF EL TEN ELEVEN'S "MY ONLY SWERVING") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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