Year III for the SEC Expats

Welcome home, SEC buds.

We're entering our third season of SEC EXPATS here at the Observer, adding commentary, links and thoughtful snark to the paper's coverage of the best football conference on earth.

The SEC goes after its sixth BCS Championship in a row and has EIGHT teams in the coaches' preseason top 25, including at least three serious contenders -- LSU, Alabama and keep all three eyes on Arkansas -- for the title. The NCAA also has ongoing investigations at almost as many SEC schools, adding altitude to Mike Slive's moral high ground as the SEC commissioner leads the way toward serious reform of college football.

All of that will be fair game here in the weeks ahead. The group of us running this blog -- the major contributors are Tommy Tomlinson (UGA), Trent Roberts (MSU), Peter St. Onge (Auburn), Steve Harrison (LSU) and yours truly (Alabama) -- will try to keep the EXPATS a fresh and fun home-away-from-home through the bowl games.

Given certain, ahem, industry fluctuations, there are not as many EXPATS to go around this year. And those of us still standing have the most splendid opportunity to contribute to the newspaper in more and more ways. In other words, we do this on the side because we love college football and feel we can add something you can't find in the morning sports pages.

So if there's cool stuff on your team that we haven't picked up, let us know and we'll do what we can. That invitation goes out with complete Eddie Haskell sincerity to the SEC teams not represented in the room. Your teams will show up in the blog, sure. But it may not be in context that you and your alumni society would prefer. Such is life. Such is the SEC.

We're less than a month off from Double-Whammy Night. The country's annual SEC coming-out party offers a double feature: Oregon-LSU, an early BCS elimination game, and Boise State-Georgia, in which Georgia takes its first big step toward the Road to Respectability.

Week II offers Alabama at Penn State and South Carolina at Georgia . . . and on and on and on.

And of course there are the individual stories. Is Les Miles still noshing on grass? Have Alabama fans dried their eyes over last year's Iron Bowl? Does it seem to you like Stephen Garcia has been the quarterback at South Carolina since 1983?

Climb aboard. It should be another fun six months.

mg