SEC = South Eastern Conference
It's the Division I-A NCAA athletic conference to which most of the state schools in the southeastern US belong - the Universities of Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and South Carolina, plus Louisiana State, Mississippi State, and two other universities, Auburn and Vanderbilt. Matchups during the season usually fall into one of three categories:
+ ridiculously mis-matched exhibition type games, like when Georgia is slated to play somewhere tiny and relatively unknown for its first home game (to, hopefully, be assured of a win);
+ regional rivalries, like Alabama-Auburn or Georgia-Georgia Tech, that may or may not be intra-SEC matchups but are some of the most anticipated games all year (just like the local Tyne-Tees derby (Middlesbrough-Newcastle) here, or Sunderland-Newcastle); and
+ SEC rivalries, which can also be some of the biggest matchups and most highly anticipated games, especially Georgia-Tennessee and today's game, Georgia-Florida, which inspires so much tailgating and drinking and cheering and general debauchery that it's actually no longer played at either home stadium but in the NFL stadium in Jacksonville, on "neutral" ground (in quotes because Alltel Stadium has strong ties to the University of Florida, so it's not really neutral). The Georgia-Florida game is often called "the world's largest cocktail party," and it's a huge part of college and alumni life for football fans at both schools.
There! More than you ever wanted to know about the SEC and NCAA football in general. It's hard to effectively convey, but college football is something a lot of Southerners live and breath during the fall - so much so that planning a fall wedding is anathema, unless you make sure it's on a bye weekend, and even then you might find a groomsman wandering around with an earpiece, checking conference scores - and it might sound like hyperbole, but the World Cup fervor that seizes England every four years? That's what it's like to live in an SEC town like Athens every fall.
