When, on Election Day Eve, I watched Barack Obama tell ESPN's Chris Berman that if he could change one thing about sports he would abolish the traditional college football bowl system and implement an 8-team playoff, I was confused.

Wasn't Obama a basketball guy? Didn't he win the Hawaii state basketball championship? Isn't his brother-in-law the head men's basketball coach at Oregon State? Didn't he go to three universities — Occidental, Columbia and Harvard — which are to college football what the United States is to rugby? Why the heck did Obama care about college football playoffs?

(Side Tangent No. 1: I noticed one YouTube commenter make the shrewd observation that Obama wore N0. 23 in high school before Jordan took over the basketball universe. It's hard to overstate Obama's coolness.)

The innocent answer to this is, "He likes all sports. The way college football crowns a national champion is absurd and Obama is calling for yet another obvious change." But I didn't buy it. Then, after looking at the election results, it became more clear: Obama wanted his most fervent opposers to, at least, like him.

Look at this county-by-county map, comparing the 2004 presidental election to the 2008 election. As one would expect, the country got bluer with the exception being the Bible Belt (a.k.a. SEC territory).

Obama struggles more with southern white men than any other demographic. He has very little in common with them culturally or politically and being black probably doesn't help. But Obama was still able to find a common denominator — college football.

I haven't spent much time below the Mason-Dixon Line but from what I have heard, read and seen, Saturday pigskin in The South is no joke. It's a community sporting event maybe only comparable to European soccer matches. Obama knew he wasn't going to win any SEC states, but he did know he was going to be their president and though "college football playoffs" might seen like an absolutely inconsequential issue to the average Open Salon reader, it probably did make a few southern men think, "Well, at least he likes watching some gridiron." (If you're wondering, college football fans really want a playoff system.)

(Side Tangent No. 2: Over 4.2 million people voted in North Carolina and Obama won the state by less than 15,000 votes. North Carolina isn't Alabama when it comes to college football fanatics, but does it seem conceivable that Obama's playoff pledge the night before the election won him the state? Someone much smarter than me should look into this.)

Then came Wednesday, when Obama announced he was going with Rick Warren to deliver the invocation at his inauguration. A bit more controversial than flushing away the BCS, but it was the same idea. Karl Rove's political strategy was to attack the opponents strength; Obama's is to court the people who dislike him the most — Hillary Clinton is another example.

Is there anything wrong with this? Yeah, probably a little. But, it's not that bad. Obama likes winning people over and considering his father was from Kenya and he's still President-elect of the United States, he's pretty good at it.