Go anywhere outside the West Coast and you’ll find that the Pac-10 isn’t too hot when it comes to football.

Year after year, opposing conferences, coaches and players lament USC’s easy schedule on the weak and laid-back West Coast, forgetting that the Trojans have run over SEC, Big 12 and Big Ten teams nearly every chance they’ve had (well, save for Vince Young and Co. in 2006).

Just look at what LSU head coach Les Miles had to say before this season even started.

“I can tell you this, that they have a much easier road to travel,” Miles said of the Trojans. “They’re going to play real knock-down drag-outs with UCLA and Washington, Cal-Berkeley, Stanford — some real juggernauts — and they’re going to end up, it would be my guess, in some position so if they win a game or two, that they’ll end up in the title [game].

“I would like that path for us. I think the SEC provides much stiffer competition.”

I find it funny that Miles called out a team like Cal — the very same team that put up 45 on the vaunted Tennessee Volunteers, who happen to play in the very same conference that LSU competes in.

But enough of the verbal flinging. Let’s just look at the facts.

In 2003, the Trojans crushed Big Ten champ Iowa 38-17 in the Orange Bowl. In 2004, they claimed a split of the national championship after beating Big Ten champ Michigan 28-14 in a game that wasn’t as close as the score indicates. In 2005, they humiliated the Big 12’s Oklahoma 55-19 in a game many thought USC didn’t deserve to be in because of their “easy” Pac-10 schedule. The Trojans lost to Texas in 2006 in a classic that we all remember, but went right back to their easy winning ways last year after dominating highly touted Michigan in the 2007 Rose Bowl.

I think Miles has things mixed up. Apparently, the “real knock-down drag-outs” that he mockingly speaks of take place against USC’s BCS opponents. At least the facts suggest so. In these five years, five of the Trojans’ six total losses came to teams in the Pac-10.

The biggest indictment against the Pac-10 is that the conference plays no defense. During last Saturday’s conference play, the winners of each of the games scored at least 44 points. The lowest score for all 10 teams was 27 points. So it would seem that our defenses really are that bad. But maybe our offenses are just that good.

The greatest testament that the conference is more about the offenses being good than the defenses being bad has to come from non-conference action, however.

So let’s take a look at the greatest indicators: the premier games that Pac-10 teams have played so far this year.

Oregon put up 39 against defensive machine Michigan, USC scored a cool 49 against the Big 12’s Nebraska and Cal had no trouble dropping 45 on Tennessee, a team that rarely gives up more than 30.

Notice a pattern?

The simple fact is that the Pac-10 is a quarterback’s conference, an offensive coordinator’s haven, a wide receiver’s dream. Whether it’s the spread-option offense, the West Coast offense or multiple hybrids of both, Pac-10 offenses are more sophisticated, exciting and productive than those of any other conference.

You may think that the defenses are weak, and that’s true to an extent. But it’s not as simple as that.

Pac-10 football is about a philosophy, a style of play that a lot of fans and coaches just don’t seem to understand. It’s a philosophy rooted in the mind of Stanford’s late and great Bill Walsh: the notion that running the football doesn’t always come first. Pac-10 football is more than just a way of diagramming plays and concocting schemes; it’s a way of life.

And if you ask me, it’s a lot more fun to watch running backs lining up in the slot, quarterbacks gunning it out and coaches calling fake statue of liberty plays. Scores in the 40s and 50s may indicate a lack of defense, but they’re a lot more fun to watch than the 13-10 yawners you see every Saturday in the SEC.

Because that’s all Pac-10 football is — a different style of football from the rest of nation. Not necessarily better or worse, but different.

And as history has shown time and again, many people — like Les Miles — don’t appreciate what they can’t understand.