Urban Meyer says 2008 Florida team was college football’s best ever

Urban Meyer coaches in the Big Ten now but can’t stop touting the Southeastern Conference.

Maybe it’s a muscle reflex from his years at Florida when SEC coaches were programmed to promote the league 365 days a year.

It was all part of the SEC’s masterful public-relations campaign during the BCS era to keep reminding America that the SEC was the best league ever conceived and consecrated.

Meyer is at Ohio State now, but old habits die hard. He told a group of campers over the weekend that his 2008 Florida team was the greatest team in college football history.

Those Gators were good, but whoa there Urban. It would seem difficult to make such a claim about a team that lost at home to Mississippi. That, you remember, prompted the famous “never again” postgame speech by quarterback Tim Tebow.

Florida defeated Oklahoma in a very sloppy BCS title game, with quarterbacks Tebow and Sam Bradford combining for four interceptions.

Many teams would challenge Meyer’s claim about his 2008 team. The short list: Alabama (1961), USC (1972), Nebraska (1995), Florida State (1999), Miami (2001), USC (2004).

What about Alabama in 2012, which had its own “Ole Miss” kind of loss by losing at home to Texas A&M?

In fact, other than Florida, the only 2008 team to finish undefeated AND beat Alabama was Utah, which capped a perfect year with a win over the Crimson Tide in the Sugar Bowl.

No one is claiming Utah, playing in the weaker Mountain West, was better than Florida. But the Utes did finish No. 2 in the final Associated Press poll that year.

Shouldn’t that make Utah, in Meyer’s metric, one of the elite teams of all time?

This is all good fun, of course. Meyer is certainly biased and entitled to his own opinion.

Even if he’s wrong.