Story is a week or 2 old, but regardless

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SEC football 2009 is not what it once was. It's certainly not SEC football 2008, when it had the best team in the country. That team was Florida, which laid a 24-14 whupping on Oklahoma in the BCS title game.

SEC football 2009 has been living off its past all season, and the backlash is coming. Maybe it's here already. Maybe, as I channel my inner Barack Obama, I am the change we've been waiting for.

It's certainly not the other 'Bama.

Alabama? That's the superpower we're tired of waiting for. Just like Florida.

Overrated, both of them.

Pollsters agree with me on this point, but pollsters being pollsters, they don't have the guts or independence of thought to come out and vote how they really want to vote. So they keep flip-flopping Florida and Alabama from one to two to one to two, unimpressed on a weekly basis with the Gators and Crimson Tide but still conditioned, in their Pavlovian heart of hearts, to believe SEC football 2009 is what everyone said it would be.

Florida doesn't deserve to be No. 1. Alabama doesn't deserve to be No. 2. LSU doesn't deserve to be No. 9.

This isn't the preseason anymore. College football has a lot more to go on than hype and talk. We're almost into November, for crying out loud. College football has actual results, and the results for Florida and Alabama are not the results of the No. 1 and No. 2 teams in the country.

Both schools keep winning, yes, but they keep winning unimpressively. They keep scraping by other teams in their own league, ugly wins against ugly teams -- with Florida winning on officiating mistakes as much as anything -- but it has been enough to keep the Gators and Crimson Tide on top. It's like a black hole in reverse: The vortex of SEC football has sucked Florida and Alabama into the top spots, and it won't let them go.

Who should be No. 1? Maybe UCLA! Well, no. But how about Texas? The Longhorns are beating everybody, and they're beating the crap out of almost everybody.

If not Texas, maybe Southern California. Yes, genius, I know. USC lost to Washington. But the Trojans lost that game without their most important player, quarterback Matt Barkley, and he's back. If the goal of the BCS is to place the best two teams in the title game, well, USC with Matt Barkley deserves as much consideration as Florida or Alabama.

Hell, at this point, I'll listen to arguments for Cincinnati