Ya, I used to live in Montgomery and Biloxi so I have a pretty good idea of what I am dealing with when I get into conversations like that.
In fact just the other day out here in socal, an Auburn alumn's wife told me that Auburn's academics are just as good as Notre Dame's. While I would expect to hear something like that deep in SEC country, hearing it in California where there are universities like UCLA, USC, Cal, Stanford, etc, etc, etc, etc I was pretty shocked. I guess you can take the person out of the area but you can't take the mentality out of the person. Her husband, who was the Auburn grad just laughed and said something to the effect of, "thanks sweetie, but that's really not true."
Thanks for the reps and your contributions around here. It's nice to have a level headed SEC fan around.