[octothorp]

The SEC has had pretty much a perfect situation when it comes to computer rankings. Computers love an easy hierarchy. If there's a simple hierarchy, teams at the top of that heap are ranked higher than they would be in more complex hierarchies, while the opposite is true for teams at the bottom of the hierarchy. The more complex the balances between teams, the more all those teams involved will be middling.
Let's say you rank the teams:
Auburn
LSU
Alabama*
Arkansas
South Carolina*
Mississippi State
Florida
Georgia~
Kentucky
Tennessee~
Vanderbilt~~
Mississippi~

* represents a loss to a team of a lower ranking. I'll call this a 'bad conference loss'.
~ represents a loss to an out-of-conference team, but they're immaterial to what I'm looking at.

So the totals are five out of conference losses, and only two in-conference games that would get in the way of an otherwise error-free ranking.

Compare that with the PAC-10:
Oregon
Stanford
USC*
Arizona*
California*~
Oregon State***~~
ASU~
UCLA*~
Washington~~
Washington State~~

In both cases, I've attempted to rank the conferences in the order that produces the fewest '*'s. Oregon State alone is more muddled than the entire SEC:

That's seven 'bad conference losses', and that doesn't include the likely USC loss to Oregon State, which would be an eight. So even if the conference is stronger as a whole (As Sagarin finds in his rankings), the upper teams are going to be hurt by the complex relationships of the middle and bottom tier of teams in the conference.