Not only can he provide recipes and tell you what to eat at tailgates all over the conference, Warner can also tell you all about SEC passion and what it means to be a fan of Southeastern Conference football.

In Foley, Alabama, we sat in a quiet park surrounded by tall trees and next to an empty playground. The entire town will feel as empty as the playground on Friday night. Why?

Because it's high school football season, and we're in the southeast. Foley plays Daphne, and you better believe Foley fans will be driving to the nearby town to see the game.

Warner, who has also written books about SEC sports history and blogs on tigerdroppings.com, says that type of passion is one of the reasons why the SEC has produced more All-Americans and more NFL players than any other conference.

"In the South, southerners don't really think. They feel," he said. "And there's nothing they feel more passionate about than college football."

Warner is, without question, an expert. You don't want to go against him in an SEC trivia contest. First he told us about the first college football game ever played, and then he explained to us that football is so important in the SEC because of...the Civil War. Confused?

In the South, in the aftermath of the Civil War," he explained, "college football was a game that actually brought the South and the North together. In the South it gave the young southern men an opportunity to recapture the pride they had been stripped of in the conflict."

Isn't that what college football is all about? Recapturing pride?

"Football is a game that obviously emulates characteristics of war," Warner said. "You have to gain ground. It's a very physical game. The most common way to bring down a ball carrier after the Civil War was to just smack him upside the head."

It was an interesting way to think about America's favorite sport,and a comparison that some people might shy away from making in today's sensitive environment. In fact Kellen Winslow Jr got into a lot of trouble just a few years for calling himself a "soldier." But Warner's war analogy is the most scientific explanation for why some people think the most passionate college football fans are in the southeast.

"Winning in football (after the Civil War) presented that immediate opportunity to get revenge and then prove that they were tough people."

So we know how football became so popular, but what about tailgaiting? Warner says the when games started being shown on television, game times were moved to earlier in the day so more games could air. This disrupted the tradition of partying all day until kickoff at night. Well what's a game without a party?

"So people said, 'well we still have to have our parties. We'll take the party out to the campus, and we'll tailgate'," Warner said. "That's pretty much how it got started."

The parties haven't stopped, and clearly the passion for football won't go away either in the SEC.

And if you want to learn about that passion or find a mean recipe for your tailgate, Chris Warner's got a book you might find interesting.