re: USC losing to Notre Dame kinda helps

quote:

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While I agree that it is stupid, SEC fans do this comparison with Masoli. Do you LOL at them as well?

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This is why the reason that Crap-Ten football cannot compare to SEC football:

SEC teams [even mediocre ones] regularly fill their stadiums with sixty thousand or more fans. Fan support is unrivaled in the SEC compared to the Pac-Ten. I watched the Cal-ASU game this year, and NO ONE was in the stands. The same goes for a lot of other teams. Hell, Stanford is BCS Bowl bound [most likely], and they can't even field forty-thousand fans in their stadium.

Why does that make a difference? I'll tell you why. Support. Fans are crazy about football in the SEC, and they'll give away huge portions of their earnings to support their teams, win or lose. They put enormous pressure on ADs to put the pieces together to field successful teams. That's why athletic budgets are ridiculously high in the SEC. Alabama's budget a few years back was around ninety-six million dollars. UF's was in the same ballpark, as was Auburn and LSU if I remember correctly. UT and UGA were around eighty million or so. Arkansas was almost seventy-million. The public school in the Pac-Ten with the largest athletic budget is Cal, and its budget is a hair above Arkansas, which is like sixth or seventh in the SEC budget-wise.

Why does that make a difference? Again, I'll tell you why. Coaches, facilities, pageantry, hoopla, and marketing. Coaches want to coach in big stadiums with crazy loud fans and get fat paychecks, and players want to play in those stadiums.

Combine that with the fact that the SEC is in a pretty fertile recruiting bed and sandwiched by two of the most football talent rich states in the nation in Texas and Florida, we get the best players.

/argument.