Please. 

Please stop running around like Bess Truman with her head cut off.   Stop worrying about where you'll find boiled peanuts, a slice of red velvet cake or a saved tin of bacon grease when you're hungry.  Stop imagining how you'd look in a sweater vest.   Or where the hub is for Mid-West Airlines. 

The SEC should stand pat.  Adding teams from anywhere will change everything forever.  Let alone adding them from the Northwest Territories.  Playing teams once every eight to ten years?  Traveling to places where you can't order a glass of tea without having to specify whether you want it unsweetened or like the good Lord intended it?  How's it gonna feel chanting SEC! SEC!  at a game where Mizz-ewe is playing Indiana?  Would you even do it?  Would anyone? 

You want to turn on the Lincoln Financial game (God Bless Jefferson Pilot) Saturday morning at eleven and watch Missouri play North Carolina State?  You call that an SEC game?  Next thing you know, we'll all be converted Methodists pining for a conference-wide Honest, Helpful and Straighforward Civility Code. 

Step right up folks. Enroll in the Tom Brokaw Speech Therapy Course for The Advancement of Proper D-i-c-t-i-o-n.  You want to trade William Faulkner for Erma Bombeck, be my guest.  Do you know how long a drive it is to Norman, Oklahoma?  That would be 708.6 miles.  Eleven hours and two minutes.  Assuming you don't stop.  And if you do, good luck finding a Stuckeys.

The Southeastern Conference is the best football conference in the land.  It always has been.  It always will be.  Even without Missouri, Oklahoma or Southern California (it has the word Southern in it, after all).  If we add these foreigners, will we all get a little bit richer?  Will we get a little bit more powerfullllll?  If we don't, will we lose a recruit here and a recruit there?  We might.  We might.  But what do we lose in the trade off?  Is it worth our history?  Our brotherhood?  Our IDENTITY?  

Go ahead.  Prattle on about television networks and new markets and bank accounts and keeping up with the Jim Be-Damn Delaney's of the world.

But let me ask you.  What is the price for your ever loving soul?