Dixieland Delight: A Football Season on the Road in the Southeastern Conference – A Hilarious and Irreverent Chronicle of Southern Sports Fervor

by Clay Travis

There is no college ball more passionate and competitive than football in the Southeastern Conference, where seven of the twelve schools boast stadiums bigger than any in the NFL and 6.5 million fans hit the road every year to hoot and holler their teams to victory. In September 2006, popular sports columnist and lifelong University of Tennessee fan Clay Travis set out on his "Dixieland Delight Tour." Without a single map, hotel reservation, or game ticket, he began an 8,000-mile journey through the beating heart of the Southland. As Travis toured the SEC, he immersed himself in the bizarre game-day rituals of the common fan, brazenly dancing with the chancellor's wife at a Vanderbilt frat party, hanging with University of Florida demigod quarterback Tim Tebow, and abandoning himself totally to the ribald intensity and religious fervor of SEC football. Dixieland Delight is Travis's hilarious, loving, irreverent, and endlessly entertaining chronicle of a season of ironic excess in a world that goes a little crazy on football Saturdays.

Genres: Sports, Football, Nonfiction, Travel, Memoir, College

384 pages, Paperback

First published July 31, 2007

Reviews

[Sara · Rating 1 out of 5]

This is the perfect book for male SEC fans ages 17-24. I would describe it as bro-tastic.

[Candis · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book. My favorite chapters were not the ones describing each game-day experience in the SEC, but rather the sections describing the author's personal life, family history, top ten lists, etc.
Although I enjoyed the book, I did have a few concerns. I will not name them all, but will say that it was irritating the way the book was clearly written with a male audience in mind...but then again, what do you expect from an author who admits he's married to a Michigan grad and his mother didn't become an avid football fan until later in life. I believe that although Mr. Clay knows a lot about football, he has no real clue about the heart and soul of the female SEC fan. For example, at one point he writes a mock eulogy for JP Sports and advises the reader to make sure his wife is out of the room watching reruns of Grey's Anatomy. As a female reader, this comment took me by surprise. I had to close the book and make sure the cover didn't actually say, "Dixieland Delight Tour for Men," or "The Man's Guide to the Dixieland Delight Tour."

[Carl · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you can get past the tawdry slobbering of a married man ogling college age women, you’re left with an interesting idea carried out with very little depth. But, it does have homophobia, if that’s your thing.

[Connor · Rating 2 out of 5]

Good premise, but way too vulgar and moronic at some points.

[Maddy · Rating 3 out of 5]

Spiritually a barstool sports publication. Despite that I still enjoyed it

[Rob · Rating 2 out of 5]

I enjoyed the overall idea of this book, and many parts were very good. I wish that the author had focused much less on the drinking and partying culture of these games and more on the games themselves. However, a great deal of focus was given over to the tailgating culture, particularly among those focused more on the bar and party scene. Travis does a great job of showing the differences in each SEC venue and pointing out interesting information about each school and their respective football programs. It was interesting to see the changes in the SEC since 2006 to the present of 2012.

I enjoyed not only the stories of his visits themselves, but also most of the short segments between these visits. Travis is funny and interesting with his tirades and ideas, or at least most of them. I found a couple of these sections to be inappropriate, especially along with his focus on the party culture. Travis' values seem to be different from my own in several ways. Even so, there was some information of value here, and some stories of his trips that I enjoyed tremendously.

I would definitely not recommend this book to anyone else, and did not gain anything worthwhile by reading this book. It is definitely not worth the money to purchase, no matter how cheap you can find it. If you do read it, you're probably better off to skip some sections altogether. They don't add anything to the storyline or the purpose of the book. If you love SEC football, you will enjoy aspects. Overall, this is one I would rather have left on the shelf. But, when I start something, I finish it, and there were some interesting tales here. I did enjoy his perspective of the SEC championship and his ratings of the venues in the final section of the book. I enjoyed his personalizing the book as he related it to his relationship with his grandfather. I can appreciate that very much.

[Parker · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sportswriter Clay Travis writes a hilarious inside into the dream of every young boy that was born in the south. Travis' "Dixieland Delight" tour is a tour that goes through every SEC town in 2006. Travis details how he fell in love with the game of football early in his life while watching football with his grandfather. I loved hearing how these kind of experiences are shared everywhere in the south.

Football is a uniting factor in southern states. Every Saturday a town is united in cheering on their team and this book truly shows how this is a common subject throughout the south. I know that in College Station some of my most fond memories of the town are shared in Kyle Field, Texas A&M's football stadium. Travis illustrates how this is not something that is in Texas. He tells how every town that he went to was completely football crazy. Everyone was working for the weekend to be able to watch their town's team compete.

This kind of thing hits home with people that are born in the south. This is something that goes on, but I have never thought of it. Now that I am older and much wiser, I can look back on my days as a youngin and realize how essential those Saturdays were. They gave me an appreciation for the school in my town. Although this book was meant to be of the comedic brand, it really hit home with me and gave me a nostalgic feeling as though I was back in those same seats in my home town 65 years ago.

[Matthew Cawthon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let me preface with this: I couldn't always jive with Travis's sense of humour, which was clearly geared towards a specific type of straight male audience and occasionally left me uncomfortable as a gay man -- I imagine the same could be said of most women and anyone who identifies as a feminist. I don't think he means any ill by it, he seems like a smart and thoughtful guy, but I would blame no one for being unable to get through Dixieland Delight without lots of eye-rolling and frustration whenever the writing turns towards women or the constant ribbing of "bicurious" fashion trends or whatever. It's sometimes groan-inducing, and certainly a product of its time. (It's hard to imagine this sort of talk flying nowadays; it's amazing the changes we've seen in just over 10 years.)

But I mostly thought Dixieland Delight was a blast to read and offered a load of genuinely warm-hearted insights. His effort to find out what set each SEC school apart from the others made for a frequently hilarious romp, but more than that, it illuminated what makes this conference so special and honestly just made me want to visit my family in Georgia and Tennessee immediately. (Growing up in VA, my relationship to college football wasn't quite the same as his, but my roots across the South made sure I was never too far; that said, I'll skip the visit to my FL relatives, sorry.)

Now I'm just ready for fall to hurry up and get here. As Clay Travis says of football (okay, specifically of live SEC games, but sue me), "Quite simply, it doesn't get much better than this."

[Joe Stevens · Rating 3 out of 5]

Do you like ex=frat boys who still think they are twenty? Do you like lawyers? Yeah me either. There lies the issue with this book. Unlikable. Also unfunny as the author thinks he's funny and tries way to hard to validate this when he just isn't. It is that open mic night at the comedy club thing that makes you appreciate how rare a Robin Williams really is.

That said if you want to find out what kind of life the SEC fan led back when someone could seriously frame the question of what Alabama would be like with new coach Nick Saban, this is the book for you. It covers what might be the glory days of the conference when money wasn't yet the end all and for some schools wasn't even the be all. Bars, women, tailgating and sometimes the games.

[Mackenzie McClintock · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is just great, a novel that any fan of sports will love. Whether you watch SEC football or not, you'll find this book to be hilarious, fun, and addictive.

Clay Travis really humanizes all aspects of attending a college game, what the experience is like for fans of every team, and adds so much humor to the scene of each campus. I was able to picture each setting and feel like I was there next to him as he was attending the games.

The writing is easy to read and understand. Be prepared for some blunt and not always politically correct humor. Embrace the novel for what it is- a story of SEC football and all of the fans who make it into beautiful chaos each season.

[Kev Willoughby · Rating 3 out of 5]

Enjoyable read for the most part, especially the early parts of the book. I found the descriptions of his memories of watching college football with his grandfather to be very endearing. However, the focus seemed to shift gradually from the fan experience at each particular SEC stadium to a general attempt at wittiness in every single paragraph. I also wonder, as this book was published in 2006, how some of the graphic descriptions of the physical attributes of the coeds at each SEC school would go over if this same book were published again in 2019. Much of that would likely be edited out.

[Brad Taylor · Rating 1 out of 5]

Absolutely hated this book and that's sad because I love college football. This wasn't about college football as much as it was about this Clay Travis dudes' fantasy world. The part where he wanted to be the world's best bad punter was just plain sad. This book had so much potential to be good, but it severely missed the mark in so many ways.
Plus, being a married man and ranking the best looking girls from each of the colleges and then the way he did it was even off. Not a good book in the least.

[Ted Barringer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good book, not great, certainly worth 4-stars. There were some humorous stories, some heart-felt stories, but I was always getting the feeling that he was trying to be a married Hunter S Thompson. He just couldn't quite pull it off. Maybe it's because I didn't know of or had ever heard of Clay Travis in 2007 - now, he is everywhere. I found it hard to place him in bars, getting drunk, given who he is now, buy I would remind myself he was only 27.

[Dave · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book to read while vacationing at the beach, which I am currently. Lighthearted reading that can easily be done in chapter-size bites. As a SEC college grad I enjoyed reading about Clay Travis’ experiences visiting each of its member schools and his resulting observations.

[Kristi Bumpus · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have little interest in football as a sport but was interested in reading about the culture that surrounds SEC games. This book did provide that, and I probably would have given it a higher rating were the author not so unlikeable — or at least 50 percent as funny as he thought he was.

[Michael Duxbury · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious collection of road trips from the SEC written from the point of view of a real fan on the road

[Christina · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy and fun read! I loved learning about what made each SEC tailgate unique. It was also easy to read just a few pages - I read this during my son’s 230 am feeds.

[Jennifer · Rating 2 out of 5]

If you’re into misogyny, it’s great:

[John Landes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great stories from a fall of SEC football. Already 20 years ago, wow.

[Chace Witherow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Fun read in getting to experience life in the SEC almost 20 years ago. Would love to see Clay make another book in today’s SEC with the new team additions and compare the two.

[Lindsay O'Donnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having gone to an SEC school, I appreciated the stories of fellow institutions. Very entertaining.

[Pete Kaminskas · Rating 4 out of 5]

A must read for any SEC football fan. The 'Bama Bangs references killed me. A fun experience.

[Casey · Rating 1 out of 5]

I give this book one star only because I share two things with the author: (1) time spent at Vandy Law and (2) support for the Tennessee Volunteers football team that we will both carry to the grave. I desperately wanted to like this book and only read the whole thing because I felt obliged to finish it.

Dixieland Delight is a "What I Did This Fall" show-and-tell essay that feels like it was written by an eighth grader who knows how to use a thesaurus. I understand that eliminating repetitiveness in written-word play-by-play accounts of college football games is a difficult task, but that difficulty does not excuse the lifelessness of Travis's prose. I opened the book randomly to page 32 and chose a passage as an example:

We hear the first dull thump of the drums. The band is coming. The crowd begins to stir. On come the drums. As the band comes near, the sound of their instruments becomes overpowering. Catches you in the chest and makes your torso shake and tingle...

While this is probably some of the most vibrant writing in the book, it's a perfect example -- it leaves me with the vague feeling that a middle-schooler wrote it. A better writer would have described the experience in such a way that, after reading the passage, I would have a visceral reaction much like I might if I were actually there. Yet this passage simply bored me.

Dullness where one should expect electricity is a way to describe both the passage above and the book as a whole. It seems as if Travis wanted to write about his season on the road the way that Bill Bryson might, with the observational humor of an outsider. Perhaps that approach failed here because Travis was raised an SEC fan and is not an outsider; the more likely alternative is that Travis simply isn't a good writer. Few things make my eyes water or my heart skip the way SEC football does, and it's a shame that Travis wasted such potential and made it seem like a fourteen-year-old's busywork.

As a final note, Travis is currently working on another book, about Tennessee's 2008 football season. If you did happen to enjoy this book, I still can't say I would go buy his next one. Having heard him give a talk on a tangentially related topic for 45 minutes, during which time he recycled most of the jokes from this 350-page piece, I'm not convinced that he isn't out of material.

[Zach Beckmann · Rating 2 out of 5]

I purchased this book hoping that I would get an inside look into the world of SEC football. Growing up in PAC 10 country and going to school in the Northeast, my perspective on Big Time college football in the South was always from a purely outsider perspective.

The concept of this book is fantastic. Clay Travis embarks on road trips to watch a football game in each SEC stadium during the 2006 season. If he had stuck to just describing his tales on the road and unique experiences that he immersed himself in on each Saturday the book would have been more entertaining and easier to read. Where Clay lost my interest were all of the many instances where he digressed to lecture the reader on how much of a superior football fan he is than anyone else. Part of this was that I just didn't enjoy his personality. Besides coming off as Pretentious (good job on graduating from Vanderbilt Law while shockingly being able to go out and grab beers a whopping 3 nights a week), too often he tried to be funny by regaling the reader with how his friend one time mistakenly locked himself in the bathroom for an hour at a college party, or how lame one of his other friends is for wearing boat shoes and then there were the dozen mentions of his friend stockpiling Tickle Me Elmo dolls to resell during the holidays. Seriously you could tell that he thought these things were the funniest stories he or his reader would ever hear about.

Overall besides my disconnect with the author, the story is a good one. I enjoyed reading about what gameday is like in each of the SEC's unique locations. He is a talented writer and the story flows when he is sticking to what is interesting. Given the choice though I would have preferred this tremendous concept for a book to be undertaken by someone else.

[Tom Gase · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was actually a fun read. Not only a good book about each SEC football team in 2006 but the author, Clay Travis, also talks about interesting things from each school with the campuses, stadiums (most fields have hedges in the endzone or sidelines)fan tailgate parties, school bands, history, etc. Basically in the book Travis spends a weekend at each SEC football stadium to see a game during the 2006 season. It is fun to read and remember where some (now former) members of the NFL played college ball. I forgot how good Robert Meachem was at Tennessee and of course I do remember how good Percy Harvin and Tim Tebow were at Florida. I want to forget the name JaMarcus Russell completely, but he is in this book as well. Some real funny stories about college atmosphere in this book as well (Bama Bangs, corn dog smell, 6 pounds of extra fat, etc) and I think college football fans will enjoy this. For someone who's favorite team is an SEC football team, this book is basically a must read. Good stuff. Took me down memory lane to 2006 when I first started living in Hollywood for two years and while reading this book I would actually remember watching some of these games.

[Holly Cline · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a fun read. It gave out exactly what I anticipated. Clay Travis seems to have the all too common problem of thinking he's WAY funnier than he actually is, but it wasn't too bad. And that's a common enough problem that it's not jarring.

I guess the problem I had was that I read part of this, then left it where I couldn't retrieve it for another month and proceeded to finish it then. In between, I was reading A Season on the Brink (re: Bob Knight), and it was a sports book that was just done so much better on every level. So the comparison hurt my enjoyment of the second part of the book I read. The quality was just not as good as other sports books I've read.

All negative stuff aside, I did enjoy the book. I liked the look into SEC (and at times even plain old southern) culture.

[James Gibson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Nashville lawyer takes the entire 2006 football season to visit every single stadium in the Southeastern conference over the course of 13 weekends. Southern pigskin, amusing stories, odd personalities, and creative (if not sophomoric) humor: this book has them all in spades. Nothing supremely intellectually enlightening to be found, but you'll learn some things about every SEC stadium, and you'll suddenly have a burning desire to go on a similar trip. Read it if you wanna chuckle and/or you yearn for September. However, as a caveat, the author (an elitist attorney educated at George Washington Univ. and Vanderbilt) views himself as God's gift to humanity and is not hesitant to relay that belief in his yarn-weaving.

[Jennifer H · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was fairly enjoyable - even though a lot of it is about how awesome the SEC is, and that's something that I can't agree with. I think part of what made it good, was that I either remember watching some of the games he went to or the end results. Honestly, it was really funny, some of it laugh out loud funny, and I always enjoy some gator bashing. =) I'm glad that the end of the book pointed out that (I think it was) 10% of a school's fans are going to be huge jerks, and that give the away game fans fear of having a bad experience. It probably mostly depends on who you run into, and where your seats are. I sat in the middle of the VT student section once in WVU colors - and it was fun (but I was nervous when we were winning and we were not supposed to be! haha).

[Agatha Donkar Lund · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is Will Blythe's To Hate Like This Is To Be Happy Forever for SEC football fans; Travis is a smart, smart-mouthed, vulgar, hilarious blogger for CBS Sportsline who also happens to be a lifelong Tennessee football fan, and last season he visited all 12 SEC stadiums in 13 weeks, and then he wrote about it. Laugh out loud funny, genuinely touching, and containing some of the funniest Tebow jokes I've ever read or heard (and we make a lot of them, here in our living room), this would be a stellar read for anyone who loves football, SEC or otherwise, with an unholy passion, or for anyone who loves someone who loves football and wants to try to understand.

[Ashley · Rating 2 out of 5]

I almost added a "sports" shelf, however if I've been on goodreads for 3 years and haven't needed it yet, this book would be lonely on that shelf for a LONG time. I appreciate what Clay Travis tried to do in this novel, but a die hard Tennessee fan trying to write objectively about football in the SEC is a train wreck. His attempts at pithy, witty commentary landed in the same old spiteful, rivalry barbs. But who am I kidding? I'm reading with just as much bias as he is writing (Goooooo Dawgs) and being much less generous I'm sure. At least we both hate Florida. I'm glad I previewed this before I passed it along to my dad.