The last time Bobby Petrino coached in a college football game, his Louisville Cardinals beat Wake Forest 24-13 to win the Orange Bowl and cap the 2006 season.

Congratulations, Bobby, that makes you one of eight SEC coaches to win a Bowl Championship Series game.

"Do you want me to not sleep at all ?" Petrino said with a smile when apprised of that stat. "It is a great lineup of coaches. The thing that's exciting, too, is that it's a great players' conference. They're the ones that play the game.

" There's unbelievable competition week in and week out."

Competition in the SEC figures to get tougher with Petrino's hiring at Arkansas on Dec. 11, when he was lured to the Ozarks after 13 games as coach of the NFL's Atlanta Falcons.

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Petrino replaces Houston Nutt, who resigned under pressure at Arkansas and left for SEC West rival Ole Miss after Ed Orgeron was fired.

In essence, the SEC has traded Orgeron (10-25 in three seasons at Ole Miss ) for Petrino (41-9 in four seasons at Louisville ).

"I think it goes without saying that the coaching talent in this league is unbelievably high," Kentucky Coach Rich Brooks said. "It's a great league from an X-and-O standpoint, coaching expertise. Nobody else in the country can even come close to saying they have five coaches in their league that have won national championships."

The SEC's national championship coaches are South Carolina's Steve Spurrier (at Florida in 1996 ),

Tennessee's Phillip Fulmer (1998 ), Alabama's Nick Saban (at LSU in 2003 ), Florida's Urban Meyer (2006 ) and LSU's Les Miles (2007 ). No other BCS conference has more than two coaches with national championships.

The Big Ten has two with Penn State's Joe Paterno and Ohio State's Jim Tressel, the Big 12 has two with Oklahoma's Bob Stoops and Texas' Mack Brown and the Pacific-10 has two with Southern California's Pete Carroll and Arizona State's Dennis Erickson.

The SEC boasts five of the 13 current head coaches who have won national titles in NCAA Division I-A, which is now known as the Bowl Subdivision.

Two other SEC coaches, Auburn's Tommy Tuberville and Georgia's Mark Richt, have guided teams that finished No. 2 in the final polls. So the conference nearly has seven coaches who won it all.

Meyer said he practically felt "in awe" at the SEC spring meetings when he sat down with his fellow coaches, even though he's among the five to have won a national championship.

Eleven SEC coaches have won at least one bowl game. The exception is Bobby Johnson at Vanderbilt, which hasn't played in a bowl game since 1982. Johnson has coached in a national title game, when his 2001 Furman team finished runnerup in the I-AA ranks (now the Championship Subdivision ) the season before he took the Vanderbilt job.

Nutt, who was at Arkansas the previous 10 seasons and won or shared three SEC West titles, said he has grown numb to the coaching competition in the SEC.

"It's a 'Who's Who,'" Nutt said. "The strategy, the X's and O's, all that stuff is top of the line."

Tuberville, a Camden native, joked that coaching in the SEC is akin to being president in terms of the pressure involved.

"You age pretty quick in this league, because you have no holidays," Tuberville said.

After Florida and LSU won the past two national championships, Georgia could make it three in a row for the SEC. The Bulldogs are a popular choice for the preseason No. 1 spot in the polls because they return 16 starters from last year's 11-2 team that beat Hawaii 41-10 in the Sugar Bowl.

Florida, Auburn and LSU also could figure into the national title hunt.

In a display of national respect, LSU won the national title last year despite losing two games.

The human voters and computers were able to keep the Tigers' losses in perspective because they were to two other SEC teams - Kentucky and Arkansas - in triple overtime.

"I can't imagine there's a more competitive league out there," Miles said.

Maybe the NFL.

"Other than the NFL, there is no better football league in the world than the SEC," Brooks said. "It's a meat grinder every week."

Brooks is a former NFL coach, as are Petrino, Spurrier and Saban. Spurrier and Saban each coached two seasons in the NFL before returning to the SEC. Spurrier sat out the 2004 season.

"I certainly think we have a tremendous amount of respect for the SEC," said Saban, when asked about leaving the NFL. "The venues you play in, the passion that the fans have just about every place that you go, I don't know how it could get any better.

" And sometimes you have to go someplace else to fully understand and realize that."

Frank Broyles, Arkansas' coach or athletic director for 50 years before retiring in December, said while the SEC's collection of coaches is impressive, he's not surprised.

"Look at the attendance figures," Broyles said. "That tells you the story right there."

The SEC has led every conference in attendance since 1998, including an average of 75, 139 in its teams' 89 home games last season.

"When you have that many people supporting your team every week and every year, that's going to attract great coaches who get great players," Broyles said. "There's no other conference like it where the fans are so passionate everywhere you go."

One problem with coaching in the SEC is that practically every fan base expects its team to win big.

Meyer said that while meeting recently with other SEC coaches, the conference's quality depth was obvious.

"I looked around that room, understand, and I counted right off the top of my head nine programs that think they're going to win the conference," he said. "I don't know if you see that anywhere else in America."

Tuberville noted that along with the pressure of coaching in the SEC comes great financial rewards. The 12 SEC coaches have combined salaries of $ 29. 2 million according to a published report on ESPN. com.

Miles tops the list at $ 3. 751 million - $ 1, 000 ahead of the $ 3. 75 Alabama is paying Saban this season.

"We're paid in a system where it's reflective of capitalism and democracy that allows people to ascend," said Miles, who has a 34-6 record in three seasons at LSU, including 3-0 in bowls. "I recognize that I'm highly paid.

" I'm embarrassed by it. If I had my father alive, he'd say, 'You're not worth it.' I'd say he's right."

But in the ultracompetitive SEC, the average coaching salary is $ 2. 43 million.

Other salary figures include Meyer at $ 3. 4 million, Petrino at $ 2. 85 million, Richt and Tuberville at $ 2. 8 million, Fulmer at $ 2. 6 million, Spurrier at $ 1. 75 million, Nutt and Mississippi State's Sylvester Croom at $ 1. 7 million, Brooks at $ 1. 1 million and Johnson at $ 1 million.

Yes, even a coach with an 8-40 SEC record, as Johnson has, is a millionaire. And who's to say he doesn't deserve every penny ?

While the Commodores'streak of losing seasons has reached 25, since 2005 they have beaten Arkansas, Tennessee, Georgia and South Carolina.

An SEC coach's compensation doesn't necessarily measure his worth, Pat Dye stressed.

"Just because Urban Meyer is at Florida or Nick Saban is at Alabama doesn't mean to me they're a better coach than Sylvester Croom," Dye, who won 99 games in 12 seasons at Auburn from 1981-1992, told the Birmingham (Ala. ) News. "If Croom was at Alabama, he might be winning 11 games a year. Or if Rich Brooks was at Florida, he might be winning 10 to 12 games a year. But they don't have 100, 000-seat stadiums in Lexington or Starkville.

" The guy at Vanderbilt is as good a coach as there is in this conference. If he was at Auburn, what would he be doing ?

" Some jobs are just better than others."

Brooks, who led Oregon to the Rose Bowl and has coached Kentucky to consecutive bowl victories for the first time since Paul "Bear" Bryant did it in 1951 and 1952, said he's seen the lists where he ranks near the bottom of SEC coaches.

"I don't take anything personally," Brooks said. "I think we have accomplished some things that are fairly significant in Kentucky football history. But in the grand scheme of things in the SEC, it probably hasn't been that dramatic.

" I would say that whoever is coaching at Florida or LSU or Alabama or Georgia or Tennessee is ahead of whoever is coaching at Kentucky and Vanderbilt.

" Whether that's justifiable or not, who cares ? That's just the way it is."

To make the top five on an SEC coaching list nowadays, winning a national championship is a requirement.

"Yeah, it blows my mind a little bit, there's no doubt about that," Petrino said. "But that's what's so exciting about being here and being in this type of competition and going up against that each week."