Arkanasas, Auburn, and LSU all played home and away with the Pac-10 during the last 4 seasons. Georgia has a home and away with ASU coming up in a couple weeks. So some of the SEC has come out to play.

All fair points. Miller is right . . . the numbers are what they are. In straight-up meetings, the Pac-10 has gotten the better of the S.E.C. in recent years, which clearly, completely, and satisfactorily rebuts the claims of any and all yahoos in my neck of the woods who make absurd claims such as, "The Pac-10 doesn’t play defense!" and, "The Pac-10 is a finesse league!" and, "The Pac-10 doesn’t play real football!" Irrefutably, the Pac-10 can, and does, play with anyone in the country.

I would, however, offer the following points, not in rebuttal, but in clarification:

1. The S.E.C. historically has traveled less because the S.E.C. has had to travel less. Pac-10 teams’ options are limited as far as playing B.C.S. conference teams and quality mid-majors in their environs is concerned. The states of Arizona, Oregon, and Washington have no upper- or even medium-tier non-conference teams for the Pac-10 to play and the pickings are pretty slim in California, which boasts Fresno State as a legitimate non-conference contender and not much else. It is no accident that Boise State, Brigham Young, Fresno State, and Utah appear so frequently on Pac-10 slates; those really are the quality options for Pac-10 teams within their own region, so they have to travel more to play tougher teams. To their credit, they do this, but the S.E.C. states include such B.C.S. conference teams as Clemson, Florida State, Georgia Tech, Louisville, Miami (Florida), and South Florida, all of which appear often on Southeastern Conference schedules. S.E.C. teams simply don’t have to travel as far to face legitimate non-conference teams. Obviously, such ancillary yet important matters as time-zone differentials and television contracts (both of which benefit the S.E.C. because the league plays almost all of its important games before a substantial T.V. audience in the afternoon or evening to earn maximum exposure) affect how much a team needs to travel to receive the attention it deserves.

2. As noted already, S.E.C. scheduling is improving. Tennessee and, more recently, L.S.U. have made habits of playing Pac-10 teams and Georgia has Arizona State on the slate this year and Oregon on the schedule farther down the road. Our out-of-conference scheduling is improving.

3. There is a limit to what we can tell about the quality of the respective conferences using the small sample size at our disposal. Many of the games between the two leagues have been mismatches. Bad Alabama and Mississippi State teams lost to West Coast opponents in the early 2000s, while Auburn and L.S.U. got to beat up on hapless Washington State and Arizona teams, respectively. Moreover, while there certainly have been some blowouts in both directions (e.g., Cal’s and Tennessee’s 2006 and 2007 clashes with one another, in which each team went on the road and was routed by the other), there also have been some nailbiters. L.S.U. and Oregon State went to overtime in 2004 and Tennessee and U.C.L.A. went to overtime on Monday night; because of the closeness of those contests, it is hard to say that either is evidence of the winner’s superiority, much less the winner’s conference as a whole. I went into some of these points in greater detail in an earlier posting.

4. Finally, it is only natural that the Pac-10’s travels outside its own region have involved treks to B.C.S. conference opponents or meaningful mid-majors; no one would expect a serious team from a major conference to play a Division I-AA team on the road. Although the Pac-10, as a conference, certainly schedules better from top to bottom than any other league, it isn’t as though Portland State hasn’t appeared on a few of the league’s home slates over the years.

That said, you’re right that the conference wars are mostly useless. All a given game means is that the winning team was better than the losing team on a particular given Saturday (or Monday). Extrapolating conference-wide conclusions from individual outings is a hazardous business, far too inexact to call a science, and it suffices to say that any particular team’s, league’s, or region’s claim to possession of a football monopoly is suspect. I think I read that in a newspaper somewhere.

(One interesting aside to all of this, incidentally, is the fact that you have my team ranked No. 1 and I have your team ranked No. 1. What were we arguing about, again?)