FOOTBALL SUCCESS
Southeastern Conference’s coaches have transformed it into an unstoppable, title-grabbing force in college football
SEC coaches like Alabama’s Nick Saban have transformed the conference into an unstoppable college force.
Southeastern Conference commissioner Mike Slive’s favorite historical figure is former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill.
In early June in Slive’s closing speech at the league’s awards banquet, he borrowed from Churchill in describing the conclusion of the league’s first year after adding Texas A&M and Missouri to expand to 14 schools.
“We have never promised anything but blood, tears, toil and sweat,” Slive said. “Now we have a victory, a remarkable and definite victory, like we had this past year.
“No, this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But perhaps it is the end of the beginning. We approach the next year and the next year after that with the same mindset. It is the end of our beginning and the beginning of our future.”
With the league’s football media days starting a three-day run Tuesday at the Wynfrey Hotel in the Birmingham suburbs, the SEC’s future has never been brighter.
The league announced in June a record revenue-sharing distribution for the 201213 fiscal year, with league members divid- ing $289.4 million (an average of $20.7 million per school.) In the last 10 years, revenue sharing in the SEC has jumped by $187.5 million. Slive negotiated monster 15-year TV agreements in 2008 with CBS and ESPN worth a combined $3 billion.
In May, the league and ESPN announced the formation of the ESPN-fu-
eled SEC Network starting in August 2014. The result is increased revenue (an estimated $28.5 million annually per school just in TV revenue) and 24-hour exposure with 1,000 live events per year.
“What makes the SEC Network such a different opportunity are its 14 schools that perform at the highest level with depth that doesn’t exist in any other conference,” said Justin Connolly, a Harvard graduate who’ll head the network as ESPN’s senior vice president for college networks programming. “Sometimes, football overshadows the success and level of play of every other sport.”
In the last 10 years, the SEC has won 71 national championships (34 by the men, 37 by the women). The league has current national title streaks in football (seven), men’s indoor track (four), men’s outdoor track (two), women’s gymnastics (three) and women’s equestrian (10).
Yet it’s the SEC’s enormous football success that has given the league the reputation as an unstoppable and envied beast. It’s an image backed by undeniable results, causing fans and coaches from almost every opposing league to become fatigued by the SEC’s dominance.
Like Oklahoma’s Bob Stoops (0-2 in BCS national championship games, with losses to LSU and Florida) who said this past spring of the SEC’s annual top-to-bottom football strength, “You’re listening to propaganda that gets fed to you.”
On the other hand, you have new Arkansas coach Bret Bielema, coming to the SEC from Big Ten member Wisconsin, saying, “In the Big Ten, we disliked the SEC because of the success they had.”
The league has won eight national titles and had three Heisman Trophy winners in the last 10 years, compared with seven national champs and three Heisman winners in the previous 31 years. Last season, the SEC finished with a 6-3 bowl record (with the six winners averaging 39.5 points) and five teams ending with 11 wins or more — Alabama 13-1, Georgia 12-2 and Texas A&M, South Carolina and Florida at 11-2.
The stretch of success can be traced to Nick Saban’s leaving Michigan State to become LSU’s coach in 2000.
“When Nick and I were looking at job possibilities,” said Jimmy Sexton, Saban’s Memphis-based agent, “one of the things that caught our attention was the fact that Louisiana had more players in the NFL per capita than any state in the nation.”
The impact of Saban’s entering the SEC at LSU, and later re-entering the league with Alabama in 2007 after his two mediocre NFL seasons with the Miami Dolphins, can’t be underestimated.
When Saban won his first national championship at LSU in 2003, it was the first time since 1960 — since Johnny Vaughtcoached Ole Miss — that an SEC team won a national title led by a head coach who had never played in the league or been on a league coaching staff.
In the 1960s, ’ 70s and ’80s, 32 of 38 head coaching hires (84.2 percent) in the SEC went to men who had played or coached in the conference. But since the 1990s when SEC schools began shopping for more head coaches without SEC backgrounds, 30 of 52 new hires (58 percent) have previous SEC ties.
Twelve of the last 14 head coaches hired in the SEC never played in the league, including all four new coaches this upcoming season.
That’s a remarkable flip compared with a 37year stretch from 1964 through 2000 when just two SEC championship teams (Kentucky in 1976 with Fran Curci, Alabama in 1989 with Bill Curry) were coached by men with no previous SEC ties.
The SEC’s national TV exposure, expansive budgets, first-class stadiums and training facilities, fertile recruiting grounds and coaching salaries (the league has eight of college football’s 25 highest-paid head coaches and five of the 10 highest-paid assistants) has attracted the best and the brightest football minds. Eight of the league’s current head coaches have won national championships as head coaches or as assistants.
The influx of coaches without Southern accents has freshened the SEC and not allowed the conference to get complacent.
For instance, Saban infused the league with prostyle defensive schemes and minimum physical requirements in recruiting for specific positions. It has resulted in the entire SEC signing bigger, faster athletes, especially on defense.
Soon to follow was Utah coach Urban Meyer installing the spread option offense at Florida in 2005, reintroducing the quarterback into SEC running games.
New coaches in the league — nine SEC teams have made at least one coaching change in the last five years — have kept the conference more challenging than ever.
Last season, the fastbreak, no-huddle offense favored by then first-year head coaches Kevin Sumlin at Texas A& M and Hugh Freeze at Ole Miss added an entirely different layer of preparation for opposing defensive coordinators.
It also allowed Texas A& M’s Johnny “Johnny Football” Manziel, an unknown quarterback in preseason camp last August, to become the first freshman to win the Heisman Trophy.
And it helped an Ole Miss team vastly short on upperclassmen talent and depth finish 7- 6, including three league losses by a combined 10 points.
At this time last year, Manziel’s only nickname was “t hird- st ri nger” and Freeze was worried whether his offensive line could protect a projected starting quarterback who had never taken a snap in a major college game.
That’s the beauty of SEC football. Right when you think you have it figured out, you don’t.