"It's a real plus when you have it," he said of a national championship-caliber team. "But I think ... it's probably a little tougher coming out of our league now than it used to be to be in the national championship picture. But the same is true in the SEC, the Big 12 and the Big Ten. That's what you want internally, is a lot of competitiveness. That's what has made our league what it is today in basketball. That's what we're looking for in football.
"I think over the last couple of years, while we haven't had a team involved in the national championship picture at the end, we've been arguably as deep as any conference in the country in terms of the competitiveness within the league," Swofford said. "I think that's going to be fairly commonplace for us in the future, which is what we hope for."
