The SEC will accentuate its six-year domination of college football Monday night by supplying, for the first time, the losing team in the BCS title game.
Of course, the winning team will come from the SEC, too.
The LSU-Alabama matchup ensures the SEC an unprecedented sixth consecutive national championship and represents the first time in the BCS era that the title game features two teams from the same conference.
The all-SEC pairing has brought even more attention to the league's reign over college football, one fueled by passionate fans, big budgets and star players and coaches.
"I think this streak is one of the outstanding accomplishments in all of college sports history, second only to UCLA's great run of seven straight NCAA basketball tournament championships [from 1967 through 1973]," said Gary Stokan, Chick-fil-A Bowl president. "You can make the argument this streak is even more impressive than UCLA's because it's been achieved by four different teams from the same conference."
The streak had an improbable start in the 2006 season, when a one-loss Florida team upset previously undefeated Ohio State 41-14 for the BCS title. The Gators were a controversial choice to play the Buckeyes, with many people advocating an Ohio State-Michigan rematch in the championship game. Michigan's only regular-season loss was to the Buckeyes, 42-39.
"There was that big debate: Should it be a rematch? Or should it be Florida?" ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit recalled. "Florida obviously ended up going, and, in a game in which they were the heavy underdog, they just dominated. Not only that, but Michigan went out to the Rose Bowl and got dominated by [USC], so I really look at that year and that discussion as a big turning point for two conferences -- the SEC and the Big Ten.
"For the SEC, I think they really haven't looked back since then."
The next four BCS title games brought, in order, LSU's 38-24 win over Ohio State, Florida's 24-14 victory over Oklahoma, Alabama's 37-21 win over Texas and, a year ago, Auburn's 22-19 win over Oregon.
From the beginning of the Associated Press poll in 1936 until this streak, no league had produced more than three consecutive national champions in college football. The Big Ten won three in a row from 1940 through 1942, the first two by Minnesota and the third by Ohio State, and the SEC won three from 1978 through 1980, the first two by Alabama and the other by Georgia.
Of course, fans, players and coaches of other leagues have grown weary of the hype that surrounds the current SEC dynasty.
"If people are tired of hearing about it, somebody ought to beat them, I guess," West Virginia coach Dana Holgorsen said at an Orange Bowl news conference last week.
No one will get that chance in Monday night's all-SEC -- all-SEC West, to be more precise -- showdown. League champion and No. 1-ranked LSU (13-0) meets division runnerup and No. 2-ranked Alabama (11-1) in a rematch of a game the Tigers won 9-6 in overtime in Tuscaloosa during the regular season. The Crimson Tide edged Oklahoma State in the BCS standings for the right to play LSU again.
The driving forces behind the SEC streak are well known: the fertile recruiting territory within the league's footprint, the passionate fan bases that lead to ever-growing revenue from massive stadiums and TV contracts, and the investment in facilities and coaches.
Those advantages aren't new, but they seem to be compounding.
From recruiting rankings to NFL rosters, Sun Belt high schools are producing more football players than ever. The SEC's success is a self-perpetuating magnet for them. And this championship-game matchup is an example of the lengths to which SEC schools will go to hire and retain top coaches.
Alabama's Nick Saban and LSU's Les Miles are among college football's four highest-paid coaches, earning $4.8 million and $3.8 million this season, respectively, according to USA Today's annual salary survey.
Miles is in his seventh season at LSU, which hired him from Oklahoma State after Saban left for the Miami Dolphins in 2005. Saban is in his fifth season at Alabama, which hired him from the Dolphins in 2007. Both coaches are on the cusp of their second national titles in their current jobs.
"SEC universities have made a commitment to have some of the best coaches in the country," Stokan said. "I mean, not just the head coach but also the offensive and defensive coordinators and the whole staff."
Six of college football's 11 highest-paid head coaches and seven of its eight highest-paid coordinators worked in the SEC this season.
Coaches of this ilk attract and develop the talent that has made the SEC the top producer of first-round NFL draft picks. Last year, five of the top six picks were from the SEC.
"We can sit here and talk about X's and O's and great coaches, but it comes down to personnel," Herbstreit said. "Everybody asks me, because I travel around the country, the difference between the SEC and the rest of the conferences, and it's so obvious the difference is the defensive line.
"I mean, flip on a Mississippi State game. Nobody has heard of Mississippi State nationally, but look at their defensive line. Every single one of those guys could start for any team in the country in any other conference. The SEC defensive linemen and the overall defensive speed are at a whole different level."
Monday night's game will mark the eighth time since the advent of the BCS in the 1998 season that the SEC has been represented in the title game. The league is 7-0 in the title games, including victories by Tennessee in 1998, LSU in 2003 and the current five-game streak. In the first eight seasons of the BCS, teams from six different conferences claimed the crystal football trophy -- a stark contrast to the SEC's ongoing domination.
Whenever the streak ends, Stokan doesn't expect to see another one like it.
"I know the saying is that records are made to be broken," he said. "But I don't think this one will ever be duplicated."
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