I suppose I COULD root for these guys….

Sorry anybody but the SEC.

If you want your nose rubbed in it 24/7 by all means root for the SEC.

I just know that except for decent college-level sports, I couldn't name a single reason to live in SEC territory. Poor bastards.

Let them have their baseball excitement. They have little else.

I could live on Sullivan's Island or Isle of Palms in South Carolina. Or Sanibel Island in Florida. All tdhree places in SEC country. Otherwise, the deep south sucks. 

I've been to every state in the US.   "The south.....is the worst....."  is quite a generalization - big area with a lot of different and great places.  The fans there are in to it, certainly, but no worse than many others around the country (at least where they seem to care about college sports).

Depends on how you define SEC Country, I suppose.  Florida south of Gainesville is great.  There is some great brutalist architecture in Downtown Atlanta (as seen in that Loki show).  Outside of that, I was very unimpressed with Atlanta.  New Orleans is great in parts (and very terrible in others).  I have had fun in Austin and San Antonio, but I have been very unimpressed with the rest of Texas outside of the Austin-San Antonio area.  Virginia within 20 miles of the Beltway is great.  I have heard terrible things about Western Virginia.  Arkansas is naturally beautiful, but little else is there.  The part of Charlotte that I went to was nice.  The main drag in Nashville is great, but it gets dicey very fast.  The Cumberland is pretty.

I have not been to much of the rest, but it has its high points and low points, like pretty much everywhere else that I have been.

Personally, the worst place that I have ever been in the United States is Inglewood.  I have never heard so many gunshots echoing in my life.  And Zuma Beach in Malibu was one of the greatest places that I have ever been.  Manhattan, Huntington, and Newport Beach are also great.  Everywhere is very hit-and-miss.

Comparing the South to TJ makes me wonder, where you have been in the South worse than TJ?  I don't remember ever being anywhere worse than TJ in the South. 

Speaking of bad places . . . . the worst spot I've ever seen is Trona, CA. My sister had gotten a post-bacc in education at Cal Poly Pomona and she took a job at Trona HS (home of the Tornadoes). She and her then-husband moved to Ridgecrest because he had a job at China Lake Naval Air Weapons Station. Ridgecrest is plenty bad but Trona was beyond belief. They mine borax there and the dust precludes anything from growing. Even if you had water, the dust would suffocate it. So, I've never been to Indianola, MS, but I think I'd take that in a heartbeat over Trona.