It's that quiet time of the year when we are starving for anything football-related and don't have a whole lot to say. Seems like a good time to rank the mascots in each conference.

As far as the SEC goes, this task was slightly more difficult than I anticipated, as there seems to be much more parity in the SEC in terms of the quality of stuffed cartoon characters. Additionally, a handful of schools had two mascots — one traditional stuffed costume and one actual living creature. For this exercise, I only ranked the costumes, unless you didn't have one. That was the case with one institution.

This is not science, but there is a rubric in my head. I take pretty serious mascots seriously — especially in May.

Related: Ranking the Big Ten Conference's Mascots

— Written by J.P. Scott, who is part of the Athlon Contributor Network. His work has appeared on SI.com, FoxSports.com, Yahoo! and Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter @TheJPScott.