Phil Coale / ASSOCIATED PRESS

SEC fans are a fanatical bunch, but John Walters thinks their conference allegiance is a bit misguided.

John Walters

The chant travels. In just the past two years it has been to Glendale, Ariz., and to New Orleans. Last month it appeared in Atlanta. This Saturday night, in the waning moments of Georgia's game at Arizona State, it may very well be heard inside Sun Devil Stadium in Tempe.

"S-E-C! S-E-C!"

The No. 3 Bulldogs (3-0) visit the No. 24 Sun Devils (2-1) this weekend. Some fans will view it as an opportunity for the Dawgs to boost their approval ratings nationally. Others, as a chance for the Pitchforks to begin a path toward redemption that includes, in immediate succession, Cal, USC and Oregon (good luck with that, Coach Erickson).

Still others will assess the contest as just the latest primary or caucus on conference supremacy. When (not if, when!) Georgia beats ASU, the logic says, it will provide just that much more evidence that the SEC is a superior conference to the Pac-10.

To which I reply, “UCLA 27, Tennessee 24….oh, and BYU 59, UCLA 0…and, while we are at it, Cal Poly-San Luis Obispo 29, San Diego State 27”. In other words: Pac-10 > SEC, MWC > Pac-10, FCS > MWC. If you follow that (lack of) logic.

The last I checked, conference All-Star teams do not play one another. LSU won the 2007 national championship, not the Southeastern Conference. And Jim Tressel coached the previous two national championship runners-up, not (Big 10 commissioner) Jim Delany.

Rest assured that when Ohio State visited USC last Saturday, nobody chanted “Pac-10.” In the waning moments of Notre Dame’s defeat of Michigan, you did not hear the roar of “In-dee-pen-dent!” Actually, what you did hear was the student body flexing its vocal chords with the latest in-style cheer, “Crank me up!” The mantra left more than a few confused observers confused, wondering why Notre Dame students were chanting, “Yan-kees suck!”

Which is to say, sometimes people hear what they want to hear.

Can you really conclude that one conference is superior to another based on a few intersectional games in which so many variables (quality of the individual teams; venue; is Erin Andrews roaming both sidelines or only one?) are in play? It is a debate that my editors and I recently had, ironically, during a conference call.

A non-exhaustive, highly anecdotal assessment of this season’s intersectional match-ups demonstrates that conference supremacy, at least on the gridiron itself, is an enigma.

Is the SEC the best conference because Alabama pummeled Clemson? Okay, then how do you explain UCLA-Tennessee? An unranked team beating last season’s SEC East champ.

Is the Pac-10 the best conference because USC throttled Ohio State? I give you Maryland hosting Cal -- a team that lost at Middle Tennessee State beating a team that scored 104 points in its first two games.

How about the Big 12, where Oklahoma owned Washington? South Florida 37, Kansas 34. The Orange Bowl champs lose to a team that lost by 35 in the Sun Bowl last winter.

There is an axiom that can be derived from these pre-conference schedule contests, though. It is far more pertinent to Saturday night’s duel in the desert and it is more easily proven as well. And the fact is this: Championship-caliber teams travel and win; pretenders do not.

Here is a short list of Top 25 schools that have journeyed across at least two time zones the past month to play a BCS or Top 25 foe and won:

• USC, 52-7 at Virginia
• Oklahoma, 55-14 at Washington
• Wisconsin, 13-10 at Fresno State
• Oregon, 32-26 in two overtimes at Purdue
• Wake Forest, 41-13 at Baylor
• Fresno State, 24-7 at Rutgers

And here is a list of 2007 bowl or BCS teams who traveled cross-country and got waxed: Cal, Hawaii, Ohio State, Oregon State and Washington State. Kansas, Michigan State and Tennessee also lost, but all by a touchdown or less, a sure sign to upcoming conference opponents that they will not be pushovers.

There is little doubt in my mind, having been fortunate enough to visit every SEC school, that no conference even begins to approach the conference in terms of game-day atmosphere or fanaticism. And more years than not, the SEC houses either the deepest number of quality programs (including five of the AP’s top 10 this week) or, as has been the case the past two seasons, the national champion.

Bulldog fans are simply, pardon the expression, more rabid than Sun Devil fans — or any fans in the Pac-10. Georgia quickly sold out its 7,300-seat ticket allotment for this game and was besieged with 2,500 more requests. Some Dawg fans even went out and purchased ASU season tickets in order to ensure themselves a seat for this game.

Sanford Stadium in Athens has its own universally familiar, among college football fans, nickname: Between the Hedges. Sun Devil Stadium does not — the administration long ago having rejected this Tempe-raised fan’s suggestion of “Between the Cacti” (though think of the intimidation edge that might have provided).

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