College final showcases different schools of thought

This year's American college football championship game has two fascinating teams taking part. This one is Team Nike versus Team Dixie.

Mark Ingram, of Alabama, celebrates his team winning the American college football championship game last year. This year's game is between Auburn and Oregon. Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP Photo

What we followers of sport love are big games doubling as studies in contrasts. Opponents employing dramatically different tactics from opposite ends of the street or the globe. Built on traditions with little or nothing in common aside from an adherence to the same rules. Think "Spain versus Holland" in the World Cup.

Which is why the American college football championship game tonight in the US city of Glendale, Arizona is so compelling. Not that Americans need an Us versus Them match-up to be riveted by the nation's biggest game that is not the Super Bowl. It just makes it more fun, and easier to choose a favourite.

This one is Team Nike versus Team Dixie. The West Coast against the East Coast. The granola-munching tree-huggers of the rain-spattered University of Oregon and their fashion-conscious Ducks, against the no-nonsense, old-school blunt instrument that is the Auburn University Tigers from the deeply conservative state of Alabama.

College football is a peculiarly American form of endeavour which, in theory, is an exercise in amateur sport that just happens to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in profits every year from avid fans and is an effective tool for universities to promote themselves with alumni, generic supporters and legislators.

College football is much like the professional National Football League, except far less predictable, far more fun, far more colourful (marching bands, cheerleaders, arcane traditions) and far more parochial.

More than 500 American institutes of higher learning play football and are governed by the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA), sort of the US answer to Fifa. That is, obscure, maddening, smug and in complete control.

The NCAA, like any sports organization, would dearly like to know which is its best football team in a given season. Unlike nearly any other sports polity, however, the NCAA has no simple mechanism in place to make such a determination among its 120 top-flight football teams, relying instead on the Bowl Championship Series (BCS) system which somehow collates the personal opinions of presumed experts with computer-generated ratings.

We will not weary you with the details other than to note that the BCS format produces passionate arguments every year and has, this season, identified the unbeaten teams of Oregon and Auburn as the schools worthy of meeting for the championship.

This is when the contrasts become apparent.

Let's start with Auburn. The Tigers come from the Southeastern Conference (SEC), and the southeast of the US is perhaps the most football-mad corner of the country, as well as the most self-aware. (After all, it formed the Confederacy in 1861 and tried to leave the US.) Auburn is the latest uber-team to survive the brutal struggle for supremacy that goes on every year in the SEC, one which has generated the past four national champions (Florida, Louisiana State, Florida again and Alabama). Auburn could make it five in a row for the SEC.

The SEC is about being bigger, faster and stronger than its opponents. Coaching matters, but it is first and always about athletes. Incredible athletes of the sort who make it clear why the US have never gotten past the quarter-finals of the World Cup; they are all playing the American version of football.)

The SEC's polar opposite is the Pacific-10, located on the other side of the country and composed of Arizona and the three states adjoining the ocean.

It has a generally unwelcome but perhaps not unfair reputation for winning with guile and gimmicks. Maybe even by overt intelligence. Theirs is considered a not-quite-manly approach to the game that other regions of the country tend to view as sneaky, especially when a Pac-10 team have beaten them.

Oregon for decades was one of the lesser members of the Pac-10 tribe until Phil Knight, the billionaire chairman of Nike, the shoe and sports-apparel company based in Oregon, took a renewed interest in his alma mater and began pouring money into its athletics programmes.

Now, the Ducks (Oregon's unfortunately non-threatening nickname) have the best of everything, including lavish facilities and a choice of game apparel so vast no one is sure how many combinations of green-white-black shirts-pants-helmets the team have.

Oregon's Ducks, then, have become the trendiest of football teams, which Auburn's Tigers never have been nor ever will be.

Oregon also is known for running a revolutionary offence that calls for speeding up the pace of the game, exhausting their opponents and scoring oodles of points. Auburn runs a similar style of attack, but at a slower pace and with bigger players.

So, pick your team. Nike or Dixie? West or East? Cutting-edge or old-fashioned? Guile or a sort of brutal innocence? Fast and reckless or fast and careful? Tens of millions of Americans will have made their choice by kick-off tonight and will be fascinated by how the contrasts play out.