The Southeastern Conference is a strange and superior college football landscape where a 6-foot-3-inch, 245-pound “Football Jesus’’ (Tim Tebow) and a 5-foot-9-inch, 175-pound “Honey Badger’’ (Tyrann Mathieu) have sat at the same table. It’s where Tuscaloosa, Gainesville, and Baton Rouge possess the same kind of mythic resonance as Pompei, Tanis, Machu Picchu. And above all, it’s where the college football champions of the past six years reside.

How the SEC came to dominate college football is a question every other conference is trying to answer. Enter Ray Glier, a longtime journalist who has covered the SEC since 1986. Glier’s book, “How The SEC Became Goliath,” takes a historical, analytical, and highly anecdotal look at the past half-dozen seasons. Clearly written for those with their eyes already fixed on SEC football, at times it’s an exhaustive, clear-eyed study of the conference’s calculated college-football takeover; other times it’s a love letter to the sexiest conference in college sports.