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SEC and its Dear Leader should accept reality: League no longer rules college football

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SEC and its Dear Leader should accept reality: League no longer rules college football

The SEC, which only has one team left in the College Football Playoff, is just like everyone else now. And that’s a good thing.

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The time has come for the SEC’s fans, its media machine and especially its commissioner to fess up to the reality that has simmered under the surface this entire college football season.

The world has changed significantly. And the old, reliable narrative that there’s a different quality of football in the SEC than other leagues is now more myth than reality.

Isn’t admitting a problem the first step toward salvation? Let’s tell it like it is — the SEC is a basketball league now. 

OK, OK. That might have been a low blow. But Notre Dame 23, Georgia 10 is a quarterfinal result that should resonate for a long time to come — especially in the context of the SEC’s miserable postseason. 

A few weeks ago, you had some of the biggest names in the ESPN apparatus devoted to the idea that its most important college sports business partner, the SEC, got short shrift by the College Football Playoff selection committee because only three teams made the field. 

Now, the league is down to one team — Texas, which wasn’t even an SEC member 12 months ago — and was a desperate fourth-and-13 conversation from being completely shut out of the semifinals. And when you combine it with the SEC’s 1-4 record in postseason games against the Big Ten, something has shifted. This is different. 

A cynic might say that once it became legal to pay players, the SEC no longer had an advantage in, um, talent acquisition. But a more generous interpretation of the current climate doesn’t even need to invoke tales of nefariousness. It’s simply a fact that stockpiling talent is harder now, and recruits who might have been ticketed for the SEC in past years are organically landing at a wider group of programs. 

By the way, that’s not just an SEC vs. Big Ten or SEC vs. Big 12 phenomenon. It’s an SEC vs. SEC phenomenon. 

When Ole Miss gets a couple of guys who might have gone to Alabama, and South Carolina lures a couple of guys who might have gone to Georgia, and Texas A&M snags a couple who might have gone to LSU, everyone moves more toward the middle. 

This is not Urban Meyer’s SEC. It’s not Nick Saban’s SEC. It’s not even Kirby Smart’s SEC anymore. 

Back in December 2023, when it looked like the SEC might get shut out of the final four-team CFP, commissioner Greg Sankey appeared on ESPN’s “College GameDay” and said: “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.”

Well, which Sesame Street theme would describe the current state of affairs? 

Count von Count might highlight the following simple math: In three CFP games, the SEC was outscored 96-66 and outgained 1,227-927. Just imagine if Texas hadn’t found a way to pull that one out Wednesday against an Arizona State team that way too many SEC coaches believed to be inferior and unworthy of the Playoff because it didn’t have to survive the SEC gauntlet. 

Uh-huh. Sure.

See, the schadenfreude isn’t really about rooting for Cinderella or taking down the big, bad bully. It’s the utter arrogance of believing that you can continue getting the benefit of the doubt, year after year, in a sport that has changed as dramatically and as quickly as this one. 

No one can dispute that the SEC’s very best teams were pretty dominant from 2006 through 2022, with a few notable but rare exceptions. 

But let’s go back to Sesame Street. Remember the song that goes, “These are the people in your neighborhood?”

Well, the SEC is a bad neighbor. It wrecks other conferences through expansion, it bullies its peers into submission with threats of doing something dramatically vague to pull away from college sports as we knew them, and it demands postseason structures in not just football but all the major sports to stack the deck in its favor. 

Maybe a little humility — and perspective — is in order for Dear Leader Sankey. 

Before Thursday, Notre Dame had been in BCS/CFP scenarios three times in the last 12 years. The scores of those games:

Alabama 42, Notre Dame 14 

Clemson 30, Notre Dame 3

Alabama 31, Notre Dame 14

Though the SEC can’t claim credit for Clemson, the point is that Notre Dame — a truly great, historic program — could not compete at this level. It was a physical mismatch every time. 

That’s no longer true. 

The SEC hasn’t physically mashed anyone of note this postseason, and the 2024 calendar year both began and ended with Alabama losing straight up to Michigan. Though the stakes this week weren’t as high as last season’s semifinals, the data points are piling up. You cannot honestly make the case anymore that even the SEC’s best teams have some overwhelming physical edge. Even in its victory, Texas got pushed around pretty good.

Can the pendulum swing back? Of course. Coaches adjust, and programs that don’t like their results make changes. At some point, the SEC will be back on top because that’s what happens in a normal, healthy sport. Ebbs and flows, true competition.

That’s the way it should be — not the entitled, “we won all these championships under a completely different set of rules, so you must kneel to us now” baloney that comes far too naturally to people all over that league. 

It’s time for a new act. It’s time to be honest. It’s time to face facts: You’re just like everyone else now. 

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