Mandel bringing it strong:
The Presidents and Chancellors of the Southeastern Conference are pleased to welcome the University of Missouri to the SEC," Florida president Bernie Machen said in a release. "[Mizzou] is a prestigious academic institution with a strong athletic tradition and a culture similar to our current institutions."
With all due respect to Dr. Machen, the only part of that last sentence anyone could back up with facts is "academic institution." Missouri's "strong athletic tradition" consists of winning its last conference championship in football in 1969, despite playing in leagues largely ruled by two contenders: Oklahoma and Nebraska in the Big 8 and Oklahoma and Texas in the Big 12. Now it will be joining a conference in which five different schools have won BCS championships.
As for "a culture similar to our current institutions?" Saturdays in Columbia, Mo., in no way resemble the scene Saturday night in Tuscaloosa. But don't worry, the Tigers are joining the East; few cultures are as similar as Florida and Missouri.
In its mad quest for television sets, the SEC, presumably intent on starting its own network, has irreparably diluted what had become the nation's premier product. At its core, the charm of the SEC was that it really was one of the last conferences in which all 12 schools were geographically and culturally similar. The same scene we saw Saturday night in Tuscaloosa takes place in similar variations every week in Auburn, Baton Rouge, Oxford and Athens. Visiting fans make road trips in droves, because they can. Missouri, on the other hand, is an average 600-plus miles from the rest of the conference. Walk around an SEC tailgate lot or tune in to the Paul Finebaum Show and you'll quickly learn just how poorly this move is playing with the constituents.
STAPLES: Questioning Missouri's conference move? You'd have done the same thing
New members Missouri and Texas A&M won't threaten the continued dominance of Alabama and LSU. They are likely the league's next South Carolina and Arkansas, the former of which took 20 years to reach its first conference title game, the latter of which made its first BCS bowl last year. But paired with the NCAA's recently approved stricter admissions standards and the SEC's own move last spring to cut down on oversigning, the league's golden era is likely drawing to a close.
Its top teams will still sign the best recruits, largely because those players live in the South. But we may not see too many squads quite as loaded as the pair that butted heads Saturday night. And while they'll never stop tailgating on the Quad (Tuscaloosa) or the Grove (Ole Miss), a little chunk of the league's signature charm will die the first time South Carolina plays a conference road game in the other Columbia.
The SEC obviously timed Sunday's announcement to avoid overshadowing Saturday's all-important game, but the news made for an interesting juxtaposition nonetheless. Saturday represented all that's been great about the SEC the past five years. Sunday touched off everything that will be awkward about the league in the future.
Read more:
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2011/writers/stewart_mandel/11/06/sec-lsu-alabama-missouri/index.html#ixzz1d1JailH1