Heismanpundit

I’ve been a long-time challenger of the lazy status quo position that the SEC is year-in and year-out the best conference in college football. Some years–like last year–it is the best. Some years, it is not. It just depends on how the season plays out.

Unfortunately, any kind of belief to the contrary is usually met with a flurry of huffing and puffing by the SEC partisans on the internet. Just look at the weekly guff that writers like Stewart Mandel and Bruce Feldman have to put up with when they dare to deviate from the party line.

It’s Mandel who put Les Miles in his place after the Tiger head coach basically said that the Pac-10 was a joke of a conference.

Mandel gets Miles’ motivation exactly right:

So what, then, was the motivation behind his unexpected boisterousness? Here’s a guess: He’s covering his butt.

Yep. That’s right. Miles’ comments were one big excuse-in-the-making. He’s seen the prognostications. He knows the experts are projecting a USC-LSU matchup. He knows his fans are foaming at the mouth for just such an outcome. And he’s trying to diffuse those expectations — and temper the possible letdown — by saying, “Hey, I’d love to play USC, too, but if they get there and we don’t, it’s because we had to play Florida while they got to play Stanford.”

You can read it between the lines in this follow-up comment to the Baton Rouge Advocate: “To say that the only achievement and the only positive ending is with one game and one game’s ending, that’s near-sighted, and that’s a long way away.”

Well, here’s one person who’s not letting you off the hook so easily, Les. You and your people have laid down the gauntlet, so now, you better make this thing happen. If the Trojans hold up their end of the bargain and reach the Superdome, we better see some purple and gold on that other sideline.

You worked up the crowd, coach — now give ‘em what they want.

What’s sad about Miles’ line of thinking is that it is merely a parrot of what gets passed around on the internet–and by some in the mainstream media–on a regular basis.

My favorite line supporting this point of view is this:

“If USC had to play Arkansas, Georgia, Tennessee, Florida, LSU and Auburn, no way would it go undefeated.”

Unfortunately, NO ONE has to play all those teams in one season. You see, the SEC has 12 teams. The league schedule consists of just eight regular season games, which means that four teams are missed on a regular basis. So the big boys don’t really have to play each other every year.

For instance, this year LSU will play Florida, Auburn and Arkansas. It will pepper the rest of its schedule with SEC bottom-feeders Mississippi State, Ole Miss and Kentucky, while adding a non-conference schedule that includes Middle Tennesse State, Louisiana Tech and Tulane.

There is a big case to be made that while some of the elite SEC teams may have four or five relatively tough games, the rest of the schedule is quite conducive to preparing for those games.

And again, I must point out that inter-conference play is always going to be tougher due to familiarity with personnel and systems among league foes. That’s why out-of-conference scheduling is so important when it comes to testing the true strength of a conference. Unfortunately, this is an area in which much of the SEC has been sorely lacking in recent years.

Conversely, the Pac-10 plays a round-robin schedule, where no team is missed. What’s more, the conference tends to schedule tougher out-of-conference opponents and also plays more road games. This more than tips the schedule toughness ledger squarely in the Pac-10’s corner.

This is why every year we see football guru Phil Steele rate the Pac-10 schedules as the nation’s toughest.

This year’s toughest schedules, according to Steele:

1. Washington
2. USC
3. Wsahington State
4. Arizona
5. UCLA
6. Stanford
7. Oregon State
8. California
9. Duke
10. Texas A&M
11. Oregon
15. Arizona State

Um, that’s the EIGHT toughest schedules and 10 of the top 15. Though I still don’t understand how a conference that plays the toughest schedules can’t be considered the best (ed: Who is the Pac-10 playing to make it so tough? Answer: Mostly other Pac-10 teams), this is illustrative of how Miles’ point of view is just plain hogwash.

I’ve spent a lot of time on conference strength on this site. Mostly, it’s to counteract the lazy party line put out there by the media and the internet hordes.

But I have to admit that it’s nice to see an SEC coach weighing in, as that usually results in a loss or two.