During the recent bowl season, a football fan called and offered a presumption disguised as a question.

Essentially, he asked, “Why hasn’t [direct competition from ] the NFL wrecked the SEC like it did the Southwest Conference ?” Seven NFL franchises occupy what one might loosely call SEC territory, but followers of the SEC powerhouses never seem to notice. Six of the nation’s 10 largest on-campus college stadiums are in the SEC — Tennessee, LSU, Georgia, Auburn, Alabama, Florida — and they attract an almost monotonous string of sellouts and near-sellouts.

A random sampling of SEC attendance figures in November 2006: Auburn at Alabama, 92, 138; Western Carolina at Florida (an unabashed breather, 62-0 ), 90, 233; Ole Miss at LSU, 92, 499; Georgia Tech at Georgia, 92, 746; Kentucky at Tennessee, 104, 382.

Competition from the pros was definitely a factor in the Southwest Conference’s demise, but it wasn’t the only one and not even the main one.

Some SWC members were struggling at the gate before the NFL created the Dallas Cowboys in 1960, the same year the challenging American Football League offered the Houston Oilers and the Dallas Texans (soon to become the Kansas City Chiefs ).

The SWC, in its final stages, combined five state-supported schools (Arkansas, Texas, Texas A&M, Texas Tech, Houston ) with four private schools (Baylor, Rice, SMU, TCU ). The private members carried proud football histories into the 1950 s, but the 1960 s belonged almost exclusively to the Longhorns and Razorbacks.

From 1959-1970, Texas and Arkansas won or shared SWC championships in every season except 1966 (SMU ) and 1967 (Texas A&M ).

Texas won national championships in 1963 and 1969; Arkansas claimed one in 1964 during a 22-game winning streak.

This was the decade where the Cowboys and Oilers turned the Dallas-Fort Worth metroplex and the Houston area into “pro” territory at the direct expense of the SMU Mustangs, the TCU Horned Frogs, the Rice Owls and Houston Cougars.

In 1969, the 100 th anniversary of college football, the ’Horns and Hogs had the rest of the SWC so clearly whipped down that ABC-TV had no qualms about asking Arkansas and Texas to switch their mid-October game at Fayetteville to December in hopes it could be an unofficial college super bowl.

Sure enough, the ’Horns and Hogs showed up undefeated, No. 1 and No. 2 at the polls. (I’ll spare you the painful details of the Big Shootout; you probably know them by heart. )

Houston’s Cougars joined the SWC football race in 1976, and promptly earned bids to four Cotton Bowl games in nine years, but they had no fan base to speak of.

A Cotton Bowl official, thinking he was popping off privately to reporters in a hospitality room setting, said, “Their fans come to Dallas in four cars and eat at 7-Eleven.” He was embarrassed when his complaint made the papers, and wasn’t amused when someone asked if he would apologize to all four carloads of UH fans.

In 1990, Arkansas withdrew from the malaise-stricken SWC and switched to the burgeoning SEC. The other members jeered briefly and then started scrambling for affiliations of their own. By 1995, the league was ready for the archives.

Vanderbilt is the only privately supported member of the 12-team SEC. A visit to a Commodores game at Nashville, Tenn., can remind you of long-ago trips to watch the Rice Owls. Vanderbilt drew 39, 773 at home (close to capacity ) for Tennessee, its most traditional rival, on Nov. 19.

The best SWC-SEC comparison was probably offered by Larry Lacewell, while he was serving as Tennessee’s defensive coordinator in the early 1990 s.

“In the SWC, it’s always Texas and maybe one other team — Arkansas sometimes, A&M or Houston sometimes. In the SEC, you’re up against seven or eight versions of Texas every year.”