From today's Demo-Zette

Second to none
BOB HOLT
BATON ROUGE, La. -- Arkansas Coach John McDonnell doesn't know which team will win the men's title at the NCAA Outdoor Track and Field Championships that begin today, but he's sure about the conference.
"There's no doubt it will be an SEC team," McDonnell said. "I just hope it's Arkansas that comes out on top."
Defending NCAA champion Tennessee is a strong favorite to repeat as the team title winner, with LSU and Arkansas expected to mount challenges.
Tennessee, LSU and Arkansas are ranked 1-2-3 nationally in the latest Trackwire poll and have won 12 of the last 13 NCAA men's titles.
Stanford is the only team to break up the SEC's domination in that span, with the Cardinal winning the 2000 NCAA championship to stop Arkansas' eight-year hold on the title from 1992-99. LSU won back-to-back championships in 1989-90 and Tennessee won in 1991 and 2001.
"We're riding the wave right now," Tennessee Coach Bill Webb said. "We compete so hard against each other in the SEC that we all feed off of that."
After Tennessee, LSU and Arkansas, the Trackwire top 20 includes Florida and Mississippi State tied at No. 5, South Carolina at No. 7, Georgia at No. 9, Alabama at No. 13 and Auburn at No. 16.
The Pacific-10 used to be the strongest conference in men's outdoor track. In the first 68 years of the NCAA meet, from 1921-1988, Pac-10 teams won a combined 44 championships, including 26 by Southern Cal, 8 by UCLA, 5 by Oregon, 3 by Stanford and 1 each by Arizona State and California.
Teams now in the SEC won only three titles in that stretch: LSU in 1933, Tennessee in 1974 and Arkansas in 1985, when the Razorbacks were in the Southwest Conference.
Arkansas' move to the SEC for the 1991-92 school year elevated the conference to new heights in terms of track. The three consecutive NCAA titles by LSU and Tennessee from 1989-91 showed the SEC was moving past the Pac-10 into the lead nationally, but adding Arkansas pushed the conference to an elite level.
In a 10-year period from the 1991-92 school year to 2000-01, Arkansas combined to win 23 NCAA championships in cross country (7), indoor track (8) and outdoor track (8) along with 28 SEC titles in those sports.
"Arkansas has set the standard for every team in the SEC, and they've basically said, 'If you're not ready, we'll steamroll you,' " Alabama Coach Harvey Glance said. "Tennessee has answered that challenge and beaten Arkansas, and a lot of other teams have stepped up and become top 10 nationally."
Tennessee won the 1996 SEC Indoor title and has won the past two SEC Outdoor meets along with winning the NCAA Outdoor title last year and NCAA Indoor title this year.
Since 1992, all 11 SEC teams that compete in men's track -- Vanderbilt doesn't have a team -- have finished in the top 20 at the NCAA Outdoor Championships. Arkansas, Tennessee, LSU, Alabama, Auburn, Florida, Georgia and South Carolina have finished in the top 10.
At the 2002 NCAA Indoor Championships hosted by Arkansas in March, SEC teams took the top four spots. Tennessee won with 62 1/2 points followed by Alabama (47), LSU (44) and Arkansas (39).
"Consider how amazing that was for us to take the top four spots," Glance said. "That's like the SEC having every basketball team at the Final Four or having the top four ranked teams in the football poll."
While Arkansas has proven to be beatable at the SEC and NCAA meets the past two years, McDonnell said it's a sign of the conference's strength, not the Razorbacks' weakness.
"We're a little bit down right now, but the fact is everybody in the SEC has gone out and worked hard and recruited hard to catch up to Arkansas," McDonnell said. "We haven't come back to them, they've come up to us.
"There's no comparison to the SEC now and when we first got in the conference. It's so much better from top to bottom."
Several SEC teams have undergone coaching changes in recent years, including Florida hiring Doug Brown from Tennessee -- after McDonnell turned down Gators Athletic Director Jeremy Foley -- and Alabama luring Glance from Auburn, his alma mater where he was an NCAA champion and Olympic gold medal-winning sprinter.
Going after top-flight coaches, and not hesitating to raid SEC rivals, has become the norm in the conference for track just as it is for football, basketball and baseball.
Four SEC coaches -- McDonnell, Brown, Webb and LSU's Pat Henry -- have won NCAA Outdoor men's titles.
"I think [SEC Commissioner] Roy Kramer and the athletic directors have demanded excellence," McDonnell said. "The good ol' boy system of coaching is gone. If you're not producing, you're out."
Since Kramer became commissioner in 1990, revenue divided by SEC schools, derived primarily from football and men's basketball, has risen from $16.3 million to $78.1 million annually.
"Football is the motor to the whole machine in the SEC," Henry said. "I think track would exist no matter what, but there's no doubt our track is a lot stronger because of football."
The financial power fueled by football has afforded SEC schools to fully fund all their sports and keep track from being overlooked as happens in many other conferences.
"With the prestige Arkansas and John McDonnell brought to track, other SEC schools had to react and they've had the money to do it because of our TV contracts for football and basketball and our bowl money," Razorbacks Athletic Director Frank Broyles said. "I think anybody would agree that with the success John has had, other people got tired of getting beat, so they put more emphasis on track."
Tennessee used to be the only SEC school that emphasized track.
Mel Rosen, who was Auburn's track coach from 1964-91 and the United States Olympic coach in 1992, recalled that in the 1960s when there were no NCAA limits, the Vols routinely had about 50 track scholarships while Auburn had four. Other SEC schools were more in tune with Auburn than Tennessee.
"The attitude of many athletic directors in the SEC was, 'We'll give you enough scholarships to have some kind of representative team,' " Rosen said. "I had four scholarships because my AD at the time [Jeff Beard] told me that we needed a thrower, a jumper, a distance runner and a sprinter and could fill in the rest of the team with walk-ons."
Attitudes began changing in the SEC in the 1970s with schools adding more track scholarships, before the NCAA began putting on limits that now have men's teams down to 11.7.
Another big change that positively impacted SEC track in the 1970s was integration.
Glance, who is black and in 1975 was a high school senior in Phenix City, Ala., signed with Auburn and quickly became a recognizable star as a freshman when he won NCAA titles in 1976 in the 100 and 200 meters and won a gold medal on the U.S.'s 400-meter relay team at the 1976 Olympics. He noted that if he had been born a few years earlier, he wouldn't have competed in the SEC.
"Thirty years ago you had great black athletes leaving the South and going to school in California," Glance said. "Now you've got great black athletes leaving California to come to SEC schools. Our teams not only recruit regionally, but nationally and all over the world to get the best."
While the SEC has been attracting the best coaches and best athletes with improved facilities and financial support, the Pac-10 has struggled with it's men's track programs. Prior to Stanford's championship in 2000, no Pac-10 team had won an NCAA Outdoor title since UCLA in 1988.
"The Pac-10 is just loping along," said John Chaplin, the 2000 U.S. Olympic coach who was Washington State's coach from 1971-1991. "We're a lethargic conference."
The SEC has national leaders in 11 of the 21 men's events going into the NCAA Outdoor Championships, including Arkansas junior Daniel Lincoln in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, while the Pac-10's lone leader is Southern Cal sophomore triple jumper Julien Kapek.
Chaplin, Rosen and Stan Huntsman, the former Tennessee and Texas coach who was the U.S. Olympic team coach in 1988, all pointed to a decrease in the athletes produced by California's high schools and junior colleges as hurting the Pac-10 significantly in track.
"We used to have a great junior college feeder system in California from the junior colleges, but program after program has been dropped because of a lack of resources," Chaplin said. "The high school system is down, too, because of money problems. A lot of high schools have hired some weekend jogger as the head track coach."
About the only thing that hasn't changed for Pac-10 programs, Chaplin said, is the weather that is especially good for the teams in California.
SEC teams also benefit from having favorable weather for training, but now the conference has so much more going for it in track.
"The ADs really want the best and they go out and get the best coaches and give us what we need to succeed and get the best athletes and best assistant coaches," Glance said. "Because if you're not ready for the SEC, you'll get your head handed to you."