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In Gainesville, Florida welcomed an announced crowd of 53,000 nervous souls to the Swamp Saturday for an intrasquad scrimmage that featured statue unveilings, airplanes circling overhead bearing the taunts of rival schools and the first glimpse of a team with middling expectations that, based on the many, many Twitter accounts covering virtually every moment, lived down to the hype for most of the afternoon.

For Florida, 53,000 (or whatever the real number was) was an ordinary turnout that some of their nearest neighbors took as a challenge and an opportunity to show the Gators up again. Texas drew about the same number last week in Austin; in Alabama, a slightly inflated 53,000 just makes them laugh.

Meanwhile, in San Francisco, Stanford’s spring game — featuring a new head coach, a Heisman Trophy frontrunner and a team that figures as a legitimate BCS championship contender this fall on the heels of one of the greatest seasons in school history — drew a whopping 6,800 to an all-purpose soccer, cricket and lacrosse that seats about 10,000. And basically, they that was pretty great:

Honestly, Stanford is probably right: Under normal circumstances, drawing almost 7,000 West Coast fans to a glorified practice — yes, we are in here talkin’ about practice, man, not a game — is pretty good. Obviously, though, the spring “game” experience for certain parts of the country surpassed anything that might (or might not) be happening on the field a long time ago, and where outright obsession is concerned, the bar for what passes as “normal” exists on another level entirely.

And that, in one very brief nutshell, is why Larry Scott’s bid for a $220 million-a-year television deal for the Pac-12 is either a) Delusional, b) Highway robbery, or c) Beyond “visionary.”

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Matt Hinton is on Twitter: Follow him @DrSaturday.

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The post that set Meyer off was slightly toned down from its original version after it started making the rounds on Monday night and Tuesday morning, but that didn’t stop Thompson’s “real quarterback” quote — heard by at least a half dozen other reporters in the same interview, but only printed by Fowler — from blowing up across the Web (including on this site) and on major national radio shows as a shocking “rip” against the golden child of college quarterbacks. Almost everyone who writes or talks about college football was discussing Thompson’s seemingly unfavorable contrast between Tebow and heir apparent John Brantley, mostly in far more inflammatory terms than Fowler used in his account.

As the source, though, it was Fowler who Meyer singled out face-to-face as “a bad guy,” and threatened to ban from Florida practices if he doesn’t fall in line, forever enshrining himself into the Hall of Angry Coaches in the process.

For what it’s worth, other Florida beat reporters contend Thompson’s quote was merely a poor, vastly overblown choice of words by a 21-year-old who will never be mistaken for Barack Obama as a public speaker, and I can tell you some of them think Fowler has had it coming for a long time. Meyer’s not the first in-state coach to threaten the Orlando Sentinel’s access to his team, either. But as ESPN’s Ivan Maisel points out, a fight with any entity that buys its ink (or browser capacity) by the barrel is a fight Meyer can never win, at least in the media — nothing rouses jaded reporters’ sabres of justice like an attack on another reporter, which in their eyes might as well be an attack on the First Amendment itself. Meyer may win the Gator message boards out of hand, but two of the most popular columnists in the South, Tony Barnhart and the Sentinel’s own Mike Bianchi are already unloading on the coach this morning, you can bet the national columnists are already preparing to pounce today, too.

And after spring practice is over and this has died down, maybe Meyer can finally get a little rest, huh? Maybe?

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