Crimson and Cream Machine gives another go-round with the SEC speed myth, and gets the same conclusions: Southern players aren't faster, the SEC scores low on competitive scheduling in comparison to other conferences, and the 40 isn't all that when measuring team speed. Rephrased: the same conclusions everyone else of any logic generally comes to when looking at the evidence. It's well-done, thorough, and as concise as it could be given the topic.
CUE SEC THEME MUSIC
Oh god...it's their theme music...it's THE SEC!!! RUUUUUUUUNNNN!!!
Unsaid is this: what's really at the core of any argument about the SEC is why: why the money, the success commercially, the public notoriety, the Q rating of the conference in the national eye, the disproportionately large shadow the conference casts over college football more. The answer is an unromantic one.
We spend more money. This equals "caring more," which we do in a very substantiated way by hiring coaches at higher salaries, pouring more money into training and developing football players, and in smoothing the way for academically suspect athletes by establishing lavish tutoring programs for them. In the case of Florida, you are literally dealing not just with a varsity team, but with a corporation whose sole operating principle is making the football team a richer and better franchise.
When the shakes set in no junkie is more desperate to tie off and blast into the sweet oblivion of football than an SEC fan, and they're willing to spend the money to make it happen in large fashion. It's not the horses, it's the heated barns, frequent rubdowns, and excellent practice runs that make them shinier and glossier than the competition.
Just repeat this every time this issues comes up: we're more willing as a region than others to expend interest and time on football, especially in cases like in Alabama, Florida, or LSU, places who go way out on a limb to feed the beast of the fanbase. The SEC's loud because we're the ones who went and bought a megaphone to bring to the party, not because our voiceboxes are any different. (Okay, they're probably scarred by cigarette smoke a bit more than others'. Besides, that, no different.)
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