Szvetitz: Slive rules the roost in SEC

HOOVER — If the Southeastern Conference is Rome, then Mike Slive is Caesar. 

And if college football is a cash cow, then Mike Slive is the butcher.

SEC Media Days:
Get the latest news from Media Days in Hoover, Ala. Stories, photos, videos, Twitter and more.

The SEC commissioner might be small in stature (think Napoleon), but his vision for his conference is about as big as any leader in history.

And he’s making it happen.

Not only does Slive run the biggest and best conference in the country, but he just brokered a TV deal that, rumor has it, makes the SEC the fifth three-letter network, joining ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX.

His goal? To rule the world. Maybe not directly, but you could make a case for that. Because whoever controls college football controls, well, pretty much everything.

And Slive is well on his way.

He’s the king of the biggest kingdom in the land.

Just look around.

In something Slive called his “Brag Bag,” the commissioner went through a list of just how great the Southeastern Conference is and has been.

Some of the highlights: The SEC won five national championships over the last athletic calendar year, starting with Florida’s BCS National Championship and ending with LSU College World Series title. In between, Auburn won the men’s swimming and diving crown, Tennessee the women’s indoor track and field title and Georgia the gymnastics championship. And then there where the six runner-up finishes, meaning that 11 out of the 20 sports the SEC recognizes won either a national title or finished second.

That’s not bad.

And with it being an Olympic year, the SEC’s dominance went international. And that made Slive’s smile just a little bit brighter.

The SEC was represented by 159 former and current athletes at the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, winning 51 medals.

“Ladies and gentlemen, if the SEC were a nation, we would have finished fourth in the world in medal count,” Slive proclaimed Wednesday from the podium at SEC Media Days in Hoover.

And that’s just on the field.

What about off of it? Well, it’s even better.

In case you were wondering, college football and the SEC are recession proof. Believe it.

In the offseason, Slive and the SEC finalized a deal with ESPN and CBS worth approximately $3 billion (yes, billion) over the next 15 years. ESPN’s carrying $2.25 billion of that on its own.

The new deal will bring SEC football (as well as other sports) into every living room from Auburn to Albuquerque and everywhere in between.

“As a result (of the new TV deal), the SEC will be the most widely distributed conference in the county,” Slive said, “using every known distribution platform, including national network, national cable, over-the-air syndication, regional cable, Internet, broadband and mobile TV phones.”

And maybe even between two soup cans connected by a string.

In all, ESPN will broadcast more than 5,500 events over the life of the contract. That’s about 365 per year. One for every day. And maybe, if we’re lucky, twice on Sunday. I mean, Saturday.

Like any good leader, Slive’s goal is to leave the SEC better than he found it. At the rate he’s going, there might not be anything thing else left to conquer.

Unless they start playing football on the moon.

Coming soon, SEC In Space.

Slive says that maybe one day people will look back at this era of college sports and all he and his conference has done and call it the “SEC’s Golden Age.”

And they’ll have him to thank for it.

It’s good to be the king.