ALABAMA FOOTBALL: Tide, Gators gear up for SEC title showdown

What looked so inevitable in July is confirmed in November with a glance at the final Southeastern Conference regular season standings.

Second-ranked Alabama won the SEC West by three games over runner-up LSU. The Tide earned their second straight 12-0 regular season and have won 16 consecutive regular-season SEC games.

Top-ranked and defending national champion Florida won the SEC East by four games over Georgia and Tennessee. The Gators have won two of the last three national titles, but this is their first 8-0 conference record since 1996.

In fact, this is the first time since the league split into divisions in 1992 that both division champions went 8-0 in the SEC.

Clearly, a worthy champion is going to be crowned Saturday when Alabama and Florida play at 3 p.m. in the SEC Championship game.

“No. 1 vs. No. 2. College football wants this game,” Florida coach Urban Meyer said Sunday afternoon on an SEC teleconference. “I’ve been hearing it for a long time and trying to ignore it and push it back. And I know our players have been.”

They don’t have to push back any longer. Meyer said the expectations were enormous for his veteran Gators, most of whom played in this game a year ago. And it’s certainly been different than the surprising 2006 team that won the national title.

“It’s completely different,” Meyer said. “... This year, if you didn’t beat a team — we beat a very good SEC team (Tennessee) early in the year. So what happened? ‘Why, you guys didn’t play very well.’ As opposed to, ‘Let’s just find a way to win that game.’

“That’s where the biggest difference was. But the players felt it and the coaches felt it.”

Top-ranked Alabama fell to No. 2 Florida, 31-20, when the Gators rallied in the fourth quarter to win in the Georgia Dome last season. Florida then beat Oklahoma to win the national championship.

Alabama coach Nick Saban faced the same “external distractions” the Gators have. The Tide had a veteran team returning from last season’s surprising 12-0 regular season.

Saban said he wasn’t sure if last year’s success made this year more difficult. But the challenge was different.

“I think last year’s team, from the outset, wanted to prove something,” Saban said. “So they sort of had a built-in motivation to really want to prove something. ...

“This year’s team — and I’m sure Florida’s team feels the same way — that you had to be good and you had to be at your best because you could be, and you wanted to be and it was important for you to be that. There wasn’t some external factor out there that you were trying to prove something to somebody.

“And I think that’s more challenging. But I also feel like our players handled it fairly well for the most part, understood it ... I’m really proud of what they were able to do and the challenge that they had relative to the expectations.”

Alabama fought past South Carolina, barely hung on against Tennessee and rallied to beat Auburn late in the fourth quarter. Florida struggled at LSU, got a controversial win over Arkansas at home and led Mississippi State by one possession before pulling away late in the fourth quarter.

The Gators and Crimson Tide are a combined 31-1 in SEC regular-season games the last two years. But neither coach has a sense of pulling away from the rest of the league.

“I think it’s so close in the SEC that I don’t see it that way,” Meyer said. “I think a lot of people might, but I don’t. I just know what shows up every day on the doorstep when we go play in this conference, a bunch of great football players and some very good teams. So I can see where people think that. But I think it’s just more balanced than that.”

Saban agreed, adding that both programs want to build on what they’ve established. Nobody else is standing pat in the league, either.

“I was very proud of what our team has been able to do to ... this season. I was very proud of last year’s team,” Saban said.

“But the challenge is great teams, great competitors, are never satisfied. And they always want to accomplish more and achieve more and they’re very committed to that standard of excellence.”

For the fourth straight year, that standard of excellence will send the SEC champion to the national title game.

“I can’t think of a bigger football game that I’ve been a part of, that we’ve been a part of,” Meyer said.

“I mean, the way our conference does this, the support, the crowd noise, this is every bit as big as the national championship game and we treat it like that.”