Coaches Can't Resist Call of the SEC - Leading Off O.K., let's see if we've got this straight: Bret Bielema spends much of his six-season tenure as Wisconsin's football coach bashing the Southeastern Conference for being slimy and unfair and just plain mean. He does this to try to make his dwindling Big Ten neighborhood look more spiffy by comparison, to gloss over the fact that Jim Delany's kingdom would love to crack the slimy, underhanded market. He does this to win over the Wisconsin faithful, who will never forgive him for not being Barry Alvarez, no matter how many Big Ten titles he wins. And despite all of that, two minutes after Arkansas backs up an armored truck to his house, he bolts the whole scene to coach an SEC also-ran, best known as the site of Bobby Petrino's motorcycle accident. Leon Halip/Getty Images Wisconsin Coach Bret Bielema after winning the Big Ten championship game against Nebraska on Saturday. Sure, that makes sense. Actually, in the warped world of college football, it makes perfect sense. The SEC is where it's at; "it" being money, money and more money. So, even if you grew up on an Illinois hog farm and are as Big Ten as they come, as Dan Wetzel writes on Yahoo.com, when Arkansas comes calling with a $4 million salary, a lifetime membership to Sam's Club and the chance to be trampled by Alabama every year, you sprain an ankle jumping at the opportunity. Bielema peered into the funhouse mirrors and everything looked normal to him. Back in Madison, Badgers fans are now in the odd position of having their heads reel over the departure of a coach they never really embraced, as Michael Hunt writes in The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel. They now get to figure out if he meant any of that SEC bashing he was so fond of, Jesse Temple writes on Foxsports.com, which now gets filed in the hypocrisy section of his résumé. In Fayetteville, they are thrilled to have a coach unlikely to make a national embarrassment of himself, and a proven winner to boot, as Chris Low writes on ESPN.com. Their news was even bigger than Auburn's hiring a coach, but that is only because Auburn did not hire Petrino. No, it went with the safer pick, the former offensive coordinator from the glory year, Gus Malzahn. He was not the attention-grabbing hire like Bielema, Stewart Mandel writes on SI.com, but he does have the better chance to succeed. Malzahn will, however, have to make some significant changes in the culture there, writes Kevin Scarbinsky in The Birmingham News, if he hopes to pull the Tigers out of the ditch Gene Chizik lodged them in. If Malzahn was relegated to the "other news" category, imagine how poor Steve Addazio feels, jumping from Temple to Boston College and almost no one noticing. He did not, after all, join the SEC. In Boston, he was buried by news of the Red Sox signings, even if, as Scott Miller argues on CBSSports.com, neither Shane Victorino nor Mike Napoli is going to pull them out of last place in the American League East. But hey, at least they're not the Mets, who are thrilling their fans by entertaining trade offers for their most popular player, the Cy Young winner R.A. Dickey. Their next fan-relations move will be to visit all of their fans" homes and kick them in the shins. Perhaps it could be worse. They could be the Cubs, a franchise whose karma is so bad that their manager, Dale Sveum, was shot in the ear by his quail hunting partner Robin Yount. Fortunately in the N.B.A. the shooting was only metaphorical in the Heat's latest sluggish start and gruesome loss to the previously hapless Wizards. The Lakers fell victim to self-inflicted wounds in a loss to Houston, in which the drama may be slightly new but the team's flaws aren't, writes Dave McMenamin on ESPN.com. And the New Orleans Hornets continue to do further damage to themselves, this time by apparently deciding to change their name to the Pelicans. There is no truth to the rumor that the Hornets actually left to join the SEC. Although it's not entirely implausible.