Veruca Salt reincarnated as SEC fan

They want their national respect, Daddy, and they want it now!

The following was forwarded by a colleague. He's a UGA graduate and an all around decent fellow. I gather he's just to get my nostrils flaring. It worked.

Don't know who penned this, but it seems typical enough of the claptrap I hear among the greater Atlanta airwaves and read in newsprint.

Colin Cowherd is a big fan of college football.

The primary promoter of this nonsense is ESPN Radio's Colin Cowherd who picked up the idea from John Kincade, an afternoon sports talk host on 680 AM in Atlanta. How do I know this? I was there when John gave this BS ideology to Colin who latched onto it like a flood orphaned child to a new teddy bear. John's a good guy, but he loves to agitate, and in the absence of sense, he'll pimp a flimsy point to stir up his audience.

So the SEC is a lesser conference because its teams don't play enough "out of region" games, huh?

Let me ask you something, why do teams play "out of region" games?

1. To get attention.

2. To find good games.

3. To enter new recruiting territory.

Does any SEC team have any of those problems?

Say you're Oregon, you love the idea of playing Michigan because it puts you on national TV and you can't usually find that large a platform for your program. Maybe you'll even get "GameDay" to visit.

Suppose you're USC, you know that you need to play Notre Dame regularly and supplant that with games at Nebraska or Auburn because you have a league that is historically weak and to get poll and BCS "cred," you need to beef up your schedule.

If you're Colorado, why schedule series with Georgia and Florida State? You do it because your state produces all of about 10 D-1 prospects a year and you need to sell yourself to recruits in other parts of the country and what better way to do that than by playing there?

Here's the reality, and here's the reason so few SEC teams travel out of the South for games – they don't need to.

Top flight SEC teams are on network TV or ESPN in primetime six or seven times a year already.

Marquee non-conference games can be found down the road as evidenced by Georgia playing Georgia Tech, South Carolina playing Clemson, Florida playing Florida State and Kentucky playing Louisville every year. What's the sense of flying cross country for something you can drive to the corner for?

Finally, SEC teams recruit the bulk of their talent in the Deep South, thereby negating the necessity of globetrotting for players. The one SEC team that does a good deal of its recruiting out of that area, Tennessee, is also the SEC team that plays the most big-name "out of region" opponents. It's not a coincidence.

When you do something, there should be a good reason for it and there's no good reason for SEC teams to travel extensively for games. Georgia plays Auburn, Florida, Tennessee, Georgia Tech and South Carolina every year, five tough games all within a 200 mile radius of its campus. What sense would it make for them to travel all the way to Boston College or Wisconsin for a game?

Don't forget, traveling an 85 member football team, 15 coaches, an administrative staff, cheerleaders and a band is no small expense. Why blow big money flying cross country for games when your athletic department already is operating on a razor thin profit margin to begin with?

Let me put this "out of region" jive in terms we can all understand. I live in Atlanta, Georgia, home to one of the largest populations of hot chicks in the world. If I want to chase skirt, I drive 10 minutes downtown and there's more baby-dolls than I could look over in a lifetime. I moved to Atlanta from Bristol, CT where I worked at ESPN. Nightlife in Bristol was a pool hall and some pizza shops. If I wanted to cruise for women, I had to go "out of region" to do it by necessity.

You get what I'm saying here?

Criticizing SEC teams for not going "out of region" for games is like telling someone from Manhattan they don't know what good musicals are because they never leave Broadway.

Why would you travel for what you have the best in the world of next door?

People from San Diego don't travel to find good weather, people from Hawaii don't travel to find good surfing, and teams in the SEC don't travel to find good football games.

I realize it's difficult for many to accept that the SEC is the best conference in college football and has been for 20 years and likely always will be. Folks in the Midwest and Texas have pride and most of the national media doesn't want what they believe to be a batch hayseeds and bumpkins to dominate an entire sport, so you'll continue hear all manner of fanciful ideas about how the SEC is overrated or no better than any other conference. This "out of region" gibberish is just the most recent attempt to poke a hole in what is a doubtless college football fact: the SEC is the best conference hands down.

Well, with absolutes like that, dressed with powerful modifiers like "hands down," I'm convinced.