SEC looking top heavy with three strong teams
ATLANTA – The College Football Hall of Fame is a 94,000-square-foot mecca to the sport, which makes it the only place big enough in space and epic enough in scope to house the Southeastern Conference’s perception of itself.
The SEC’s swagger is back, if it ever left. Six months after two of its programs, Alabama and Georgia, met to decide the national championship, the league was strutting through last week’s media days like the undisputed alpha dog of the Football Bowl Subdivision.
“Year after year, our best teams have produced the best team in the country,” SEC Commissioner Greg Sankey said. “The facts candidly speak for themselves.”
Twelve months ago, Jimbo Fisher called the Atlantic Coast Conference the “premier” league in the country. Of course, Fisher was then the head coach at Florida State. His offseason move to Texas A&M has added zeroes to his bank account — Fisher agreed to a 10year, $75 million contract — and opened his eyes to a new truth.
“I’m going to tell you this: I think the ACC’s progression to where it has become in football is because of the SEC,” Fisher said. “I think it enhanced the ACC’s ability to compete and rise its level of ball because of the recruiting competition, and then, once you get better players, you play better.”
In a generic, overarching sense, the SEC’s claim of coast-to-coast dominance isn’t too far off the mark. The league remains a powerhouse, the envy of fellow conferences jealous of the league’s coffers and reputation. The SEC’s best team and program, Alabama, is the best team and program in college football; the SEC’s second-best team and program, Georgia, was a meltdown away from claiming last season’s national championship.
“It’s hard to win in this league,” first- year Tennessee coach Jeremy Pruitt said.
But it’s complicated. No longer can the SEC claim sole ownership of the crown. The ACC and Big Ten Conference can tout Clemson and Ohio State, respectively. The Big Ten can keep going: to Penn State and Wisconsin, to Michigan and Michigan State, all the way through a degree of depth unmatched by its peers in the FBS.
And in 2018? The SEC can strut, crow and brag, but the level of self-confidence doesn’t match the reality of this year’s situation. The league’s best is better than your best, and that still counts for something. But there’s a steep decline for the SEC after the top three of the Crimson Tide, Bulldogs and Auburn.
That’s where things get spotty. Mississippi State and South Carolina come next, and you’ll find both teams on most preseason Top 25 lists because this is how things are done: the fourth-best and fifth-best teams in the SEC must be included among the elite teams in college football.
Kentucky and Missouri are bowl teams, if that, and nothing more. Another six-win season for Mississippi would put Matt Luke in the mix for the league’s coach of the year. Vanderbilt is Vanderbilt. Arkansas is embarking on a rebuilding project under new hire Chad Morris, who flashed a deft touch for turnarounds during his previous stint at SMU but will need at least one full season to get things back in order for the Razorbacks.
The league’s soft middle is embodied in four programs: Florida, Tennessee, LSU and Texas A&M. Not one of these teams, each ranked among the elite names in college football, will be a national factor. At least two could enter November needing to scramble for bowl eligibility. New coaches have added a burst of energy for the Gators, Volunteers and Aggies, but at the cost of an inevitable learning curve. Even Nick Saban lost to Louisiana-Monroe in his debut season at Alabama. The less said about Ed Orgeron and LSU the better. But here’s one thing: Orgeron’s eventual first year-plus on the job is talk of the conference, and not in a positive sense.
The true measure of the SEC’s unquestioned dominance this century was never the championships but the swath of space that separated the league’s sixth-best team, for example, from the same team in the Big Ten, ACC or elsewhere. That’s simply not the case in 2018; the SEC lacks the overall horsepower of the recent past. In terms of its top tier of teams, no conference rivals the Big Ten.
In a very specific sense, however, that might not be a bad thing for the SEC. The power vacuum that exists beyond the clear-cut top three provides a sliver of opportunity for a Mississippi State, which could find its way to nine regular-season wins in Joe Moorhead’s debut. That the East Division is overflowing with pretenders supplies a window for Florida and Tennessee to bounce back into bowl eligibility after lost seasons.
“The opportunity’s definitely there for us to go from four wins to however many wins,” Florida defensive end CeCe Jefferson said.
But the source of the SEC’s confidence has never been how many teams it places in bowl play. Instead, the conference has prided itself on not just populating the postseason but owning it — and owning the regular season, too. Alabama, Georgia and Auburn might do just that, but they’ll do it alone. That’s the story for the SEC in 2018. Perception, meet reality.