Meyer: Call waiting

For at least three hours this afternoon, Alabama football coach Nick Saban and Florida counterpart Urban Meyer will be enemies of sorts when the Southeastern Conference title game kicks off at 4:10 in the Georgia Dome.

With nothing less on the line than a spot in the BCS national championship game for either Florida's top-ranked, undefeated Gators or the unbeaten, No. 2 Crimson Tide, their mutual admiration society will be placed on hold.

But, oh, what might have been if Terry Saban had convinced her husband 21 years ago to return Meyer's phone call.

"It was 1988," the Florida coach told a predominantly Alabama crowd of 1,300 inside Atlanta's Hyatt Regency during Friday's title-game luncheon. "I was a linebackers coach at Illinois State making $8,000 a year, and I probably wasn't really doing all that good of a job."

But knowing Meyer was an Ohio native who was born in Toledo, a friend told him that he should call Toledo head coach Saban about a job.

"I got his wife Terry on the phone," Meyer said. "We had a great conversation. When I finally hung up the phone I told my wife Shelley, 'Get ready, we're going to Toledo.'"

Only Saban never called back.

"Every day for three or four days I'd come home and ask, 'Anybody call?'" Meyer continued. "Every day there was nothing."

Sitting a few feet away, Saban finally had a reply two decades later.

"Obviously, the greatest mistake I've ever made in coaching was not listening to Terry that day," he said with a grin.

Of course, not everyone listened to former SEC commissioner Roy Kramer 17 years ago when he first cooked up the formula for this event, which will be covered by a Final Four-esque 900 media and will have 50-yard-line tickets being scalped for as much as $5,000 apiece.

"A lot of people thought we were crazy to play eight conference games, then a league championship game," Kramer said. "They thought there was no way we'd ever win another national championship.

"Instead, Alabama won it the very first year (1992). And as you know, we've won a few since."

Since Bama knocked off Florida 28-21 in that first SEC title game, the league has won a total of seven national championships, easily the most of any conference.

"What I didn't envision was that this event would become the showplace of college football, sort of a national spectacle," Kramer added.

In fact, Meyer -- who has guided the Gators to two of the last three national titles -- said of the SEC title game, "I would put it on the same level (as the BCS title game)."

If that's true, 12-0 Alabama and 12-0 Florida have certainly done the most to make it that way. This will be their seventh championship showdown, with the Gators having won four of the first six.

"They're just very well coached," Saban said. "Offense, defense and special teams. And we all talk about the wildcat (formation). They run the wildcat every play. But not only can that quarterback they have (Tim Tebow) run, he can throw it, too."

Countered Meyer: "Whether you want to or not, you're always watching Alabama."

Yet much as the two appear to admire each other, Meyer couldn't help but question one aspect of today's game as he recalled the Gators' victory over the Tide a year ago on this same field.

"I'd just like to know," he said, "where the Alabama fans get all those tickets."

Whatever happens on the Georgia Dome field today, Tide opponents have been asking that since long before 1992.