For the better part of the last two decades, the Southeastern Conference has been synonymous with winning in college football.
Thirteen of the last 18 national champions came from the league. For years and years, we heard all about SEC speed. We saw the conference’s particular brand of physicality over and over again. Those “S-E-C!” chants that echoed through stadiums in the waning moments of big games were not just joyful; they also served as a message to the rest of college football — that no one else could do what SEC football teams do. And to be honest, they had a point.
But it’s clear that the gap has closed significantly. The SEC may still be the best conference in the country from top to bottom, but its top is not head and shoulders above everyone else, as it was for a very long time.
Georgia, its champion, was beaten soundly by Notre Dame at the Sugar Bowl in a game in which the Irish were the more physical team. How many times have we seen that particular program get boat-raced by an SEC team in a big game, overmatched physically and genuinely slow in comparison? Texas was one fourth-and-13 stop away from losing to Arizona State, this season’s Cinderella led by a former zero-star recruit. And, of course, Ohio State trounced Tennessee, the third and final SEC team to make the 12-team CFP.
But there’s more! Alabama — a team that the SEC media machine believed should have made the Playoff over SMU — lost in the ReliaQuest Bowl to a Michigan team whose best players had all opted out. South Carolina, also considered a CFB snub, got beat by Illinois in the Citrus Bowl. The Big Ten is 4-1 vs. the SEC so far this postseason, a record that that doesn’t even include Michigan’s win over Alabama in the CFP semis a season ago.
If it Just Means More when the SEC is winning, then it Also Means Something when the league is losing.
Many pundits predicted that the loosening of transfer restrictions coupled with the NIL era could lead to a more even playing field. If everyone could pay players above board, then perhaps those who, uh, previously procured talent in other ways would no longer have such a clear advantage. If players didn’t have to sit out a year after transferring, maybe those who would otherwise be buried on the depth chart at schools such as Alabama or Georgia would transfer to play immediately somewhere else.
And that’s precisely what happened. The top-tier SEC programs are not hoarding talent the way they did in the past, which has been a boon to other SEC teams in the league as well as programs outside of the footprint. We see that both in high school recruiting and with transfers.
It helps, too, that more teams have access to the Playoff now. In the past, if you were talented enough to have your pick of the litter and wanted to play for a national championship, you could pretty safely pick Nick Saban and Alabama and know that you’d likely play in the CFP each year. Now, you can go to Notre Dame or Penn State and have a path to the Playoff each year, too. Hell, even Ashton Jeanty knew if he played well at Boise State this year, he’d be able to end his college career in the CFP.
SEC commissioner Greg Sankey was one of the architects of the new 12-team CFP. He knew why some of his peers wanted to expand the bracket from four to 12 teams and why access was paramount. Access gives you hope, and hope gets you better players.
Still, Sankey famously and repeatedly insisted that the SEC was happy with a four-team Playoff, that it didn’t need to vote for a bigger field. But it ultimately helped push expansion across the finish line after the SEC itself grew from 14 to 16 teams when it added Texas and Oklahoma. Adding two more bluebloods meant more mouths to feed. More spots in a bigger bracket meant more landing spots for SEC teams — which then meant that more of the SEC’s biggest brands could cap off their seasons by participating in the sport’s marquee postseason event.
And Sankey certainly expected that a lot of his teams would do just that. Faced with the possibility that an SEC team would be left out of the (four-team) Playoff for the very first time back in December 2023, Sankey appeared on ESPN’s “College GameDay” and said of the other power conferences, “That’s not the real world of college football. Let’s go back to Sesame Street, so we’re really basic. One of these things is not like the other.”
It’s that kind of arrogance that turned off fans, coaches and administrators in other leagues. Like the talk, at one point this fall, that five SEC teams deserved to make the 12-team field this season. That’s why there seems to be at worst an anti-SEC sentiment or at best a sense of comeuppance when Tennessee is outclassed by Ohio State or Georgia gets beat by Notre Dame. As it turns out, other football teams can be pretty good, too — even if they aren’t wearing SEC patches on their uniforms.
Now, Texas is all that’s left from the SEC in the Playoff. The Longhorns, who definitely didn’t always dominate the Big 12, nearly won the SEC in their first year in the league and are now the conference’s last and only hope to win a national championship this season. Maybe they’ll win it all. Maybe they won’t.
But even if Texas runs the table, the damage has been done. The narrative has changed, and the sport has shifted. We no longer need to default to deference when it comes to the SEC based on decades of prior success. We can — and should — evaluate these teams as they are now, warts and all.
Just like everybody else in college football.
