Last November, with his team fighting for position in the Bowl Championship Series standings, Meyer lobbied for the Gators to get a spot in the national title game. His No. 1 argument: The SEC is the nation’s best conference.

Needless to say, Florida’s national title victory and the intervening seven six months haven’t changed Meyer’s perspective. Like Auburn’s Tommy Tuberville, Meyer believes the SEC champ should always have a argument for a spot in the national title.

The argument didn’t pay off for Tuberville and AU in 2004, when a 13-0 record couldn’t vault AU past fellow undefeateds Southern California and Oklahoma, who played each other for the national championship. It worked for Meyer in 2006, when one-loss Florida passed one-loss Michigan for a spot in the title game.

“I think there certainly is a benefit of playing in the Southeastern Conference,” Meyer said Thursday at Media Days. “It also maybe limits your chance of getting that far. I mean, to go play the schedule you play in the Southeastern Conference on the road, then go play in an SEC championship game in Atlanta and make it through that thing (is very hard).”

UF safety Tony Joiner, one of two Gators players at Media Days, agreed.

“It’s extremely tough,” Joiner said. “Week in and week out, it’s a battle. Every team is going to play you the best they can. Almost every game in the SEC is a rivalry game.”

Coaches excited about new rules

The “clock rules” are no more. And the SEC’s coaches couldn’t be happier.

Last season saw the introduction of two rules designed to shorten games. The new rules required officials to start the game clock on kickoffs and after changes of possession. Games became shorter, all right. But fans and coaches were furious.

After a season full of protests, the NCAA reversed its decision; the rules have been repealed. College football games will return this season to their traditional timing rules.

“Those two rules probably had the shortest half-life of any two rules in the history of the NCAA,” joked Rogers Redding, the SEC’s supervisor of officials.

There is one new clock rule that officials hope will save time.

After TV timeouts, the play clock will be set at 15 seconds, except when TV timeouts are followed by kickoffs. Kickers will still have a full 25 seconds to prepare for kickoffs after TV timeouts.

“How much time this is going to save is really anybody’s guess,” Redding said with a smile.

But the rule that has most SEC coaches most excited is the rule placing kickoffs at the 30-yard line. Redding said studies have shown most kickoffs will now land around the 10-yard line, reducing touchbacks and giving teams more opportunities to return kicks.

“It’s going to be one of the most significant rule changes to come about in recent years —maybe in a decade — in college football,” Kentucky coach Rich Brooks said. “Very few teams will have a guy who can kick it into the touchback area or out of the end zone.”

Vanderbilt’s Bobby Johnson doesn’t like the kickoff rule, though.

“The rationale was to speed up the game, but it’s not going to speed it up, because there are going to be a lot more kickoffs,” Johnson said. “There’s going to be a lot more touchdowns because there’s going to be better field position and more returns now.”

Meyer not a fan of text-message ban

The NCAA decided in April to ban coaches from sending text messages to recruits. Many coaches were unhappy with the decision, seeing it as a threat to one of the easiest ways to contact players. Few were as unhappy as Meyer, one of college football’s most tireless recruiter and a famous text messager.

“That’s how you communicate nowadays,” Meyer said. “If you want to go back and use the rotary phone, too, say coaches can only use a rotary phone, OK. I don’t understand that at all.”

Johnson, though, is happy to see the end of the text message era.

“I think it’s going to be a big change in a positive way. I think young men will be able to go to school and not worry about getting text messages during class.”

The NCAA is reviewing the ban; there is a chance the rule will be overturned at the next meeting of the NCAA’s Board of Governors.