Every single year, there is always a debate about which conference is the top one in college football. You have your SEC homers chanting “S-E-C! S-E-C!”, from the top of their lungs, as well as the Big Ten fans who say that the last two national champions have come from their conference.
Call me biased, but I believe the Big 12 is the best conference in all of college football. Sure, it doesn’t have as many national championships as the Big Ten or the SEC does, and it may not get as many teams into the College Football Playoff, but it is still the best football conference in my eyes.
Before you call me crazy (which is not the worst thing I’ve been called over the years), hear me out: As great as the Big Ten and SEC are when it comes to national championships, take a look at the rest of the conference.
My original plan was to include the Big Ten and SEC in a single article, but I decided to turn this into a series, focusing on each major conference. Today, I take a look at the SEC, which has seen a lot of changes over the last 15 years.
SEC Football is Top-Heavy, Too
While the SEC is highly regarded as the best conference in college football, things haven’t been the same over the last couple of years. From 2006 to 2012, the SEC won seven straight national championships. However, it would take another seven years before the conference would claim back-to-back titles again.
But if you look closely at who is winning those titles, that is where the problem lies. Over the last 13 seasons, there has only been one school not named Georgia or Alabama to win a national championship. That school is none other than LSU in 2019 when they had that all-star team led by Joe Burrow. Outside of that, it’s been either Georgia or Alabama.
I get why so many schools in the SEC chant those three letters so often. They beat their chest and shout out loud because outside of being a part of the conference, they have done nothing for it in the last ten years.
They don’t play the same number of conference games as everyone else and don’t think I forgot about the classic cupcake November weekend either. It’s a way for those struggling teams to make sure they get to at least six wins and when you have four non-conference games, you can go 2-6 in conference play and play four winnable games to get to 6-6.
ESPN’s Helping Hand
It doesn’t help when everything they do is backed by ESPN. From their own network to ridiculous projections like the ESPN FPI, they always get the benefit of the doubt, even when they don’t deserve too. The reason so many of these schools have Top 25 wins? It has to do with the fact that the playoff committee and national media members put as many of them in the Top 25 as they can.
And I totally get why they do it. It’s a perfect system for them when it comes to numbers. When you beat a top 25 team, your stock drastically increases but when you lose to a top 25, it’s not that big of a deal.
Big 12 Success in the SEC
One other thing nobody talks about is the fact that schools that have left the Big 12 for the SEC have had instant success. When Texas A&M and Missouri left back in 2012, both of them had their best seasons in the conference. The same held true for Texas this past season when they made it all the way to Atlanta for the SEC Championship game.
At the end of the day, the SEC is what it is. It’s an extremely overrated, top-heavy conference. And the reason that they haven’t won anything in the last couple of years is simple: The conference is unbalanced and the teams who were at the top are starting to lose their edge a bit. Alabama isn’t going to be the same without Nick Saban and Georgia got bounced in the first round of the playoff.
Maybe Texas steps up this year and wins it all, but this isn’t the same SEC as it was ten, or even five, years ago.
I just hope some people wake up and snap out of the SEC hype but unfortunately, I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
