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Abstract
As the New South flourished and the regions culture situated itself into modernity after the Civil War, southern men discovered a new activity to express their masculinity: football. The game was violent, honorable, and physical, which seemed to align with a Lost Cause mentality that sprouted in tandem with the sports popularity. This thesis explores the role of Lost Cause thinking (an appreciation of the antebellum days) through gender, spectacle, and football in the state of Georgia by examining two peculiar incidents, including a football death and an athletic rivalry that turned unsavory. The sports beginnings were not as stable as they would later become in the South, and the men and women who supported football questioned how the activity would function in a society that straddled ways of both the Old and New.