part 2.....



The games themselves have become arenas for politicians to hand out cards, shake hands with donors and even advertise. Former Louisiana Sen. John Breaux recalls sitting at an LSU game in the 1980s and seeing a plane pass overhead carrying a banner for a campaign opponent of his, Henson Moore. "I wanted to shoot it down," he says.

Politicians have been such fixtures at the games that their practice of accepting complimentary tickets has begun to come under criticism. Before this season, Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal decided to stop accepting the 10 free tickets his office was allotted.

Central to the success of the SEC is the ability of its schools to convert this passion into money -- even in a region where there isn't so much to go around. Only three SEC member schools have endowments larger than $1 billion as of the 2007 fiscal year, while half or more of the schools in other major conferences like the Big Ten, Big 12, Pacific-10 and Atlantic Coast Conference do. Their average undergraduate enrollment of roughly 18,000 is significantly smaller than the averages for the Big 12 and Pac-10 conferences. The median household income in Ohio, the poorest state represented by the Big Ten, was $4,500 higher than the average median income for all the SEC states last year.

Nonetheless, in 2006, four SEC schools -- Florida, Georgia, Tennessee and LSU -- raised $35 million or more in athletic donations, according to a Chronicle of Higher Education survey. That figure beats every school in the Big 12, Big East and Pac-10 that responded to the survey. (Nine of the 73 major-conference schools, including Southern California, didn't respond.)

The conference has also made some shrewd financial moves. In 1992, the SEC was the first major conference to take advantage of an overlooked NCAA rule that allows conferences to stage a championship game; where the ticket sales and TV rights fees generate large sums for the conference to divvy up. In 1994, the SEC announced an exclusive TV deal with CBS that led to nationally televised games. The deal was recently renewed for $55 million a year over the next 15 years.

The historical knock on SEC schools among rivals is that their success is predicated on a willingness to stockpile great players by violating NCAA rules on recruiting and athlete benefits. While some of the sanctions have been minor, every SEC school but Vanderbilt has been on probation in the last 25 years.

Another charge is that lower academic standards give SEC teams an advantage in recruiting. Just three SEC schools -- Vanderbilt, Florida and Georgia -- were cited among the top 80 universities in U.S. News & World Report's 2009 college rankings, while all 11 members of the Big Ten were in the top 80. Last year, in a statement on that conference's Web site, Big Ten Commissioner Jim Delany wrote: "I love speed and the SEC has great speed ... but there are appropriate balances when mixing academics and athletics." Mr. Delany declined to comment for this story.

SEC commissioner Mike Slive says the SEC has made a point of cleaning up the practices that have led to NCAA sanctions, and that the academic performance of its athletes has improved and all SEC schools are in compliance with the NCAA's new academic guidelines for athletes. Because the SEC's schools are located in a economically challenged region, Mr. Slive says, they serve a different mission -- to provide opportunity. "There are differences in elementary and secondary-school systems in this part of the country," he says.

While Mr. Slive says he doesn't resent comparisons to other conferences, the SEC should come out ahead in many of them. "The reality is that this league has taken care of its business."

Write to Darren Everson at darren.everson@wsj.com