SEC’s dominance grows
The title of Paul Finebaum’s 2014 book, “My Conference Can Beat Your Conference: Why the SEC Still Rules College Football,” was meant to inflame. At the time, college football was transitioning from the BCS, a system many fans thought favored the Southeastern Conference unfairly, to a four-team playoff that was supposed to even the field and give more teams a shot.
Coming from Finebaum, who had just moved his longtime Birminghambased radio show to the SEC Network, the title smacked of boosterism and unnecessary bravado aimed mostly at Big Ten fans who had long claimed the SEC was overrated.
“I was really proud of that book,” Finebaum said. “It got a lot of interest, it did well. It was controversial then. If I came out with that book today, the reaction to it would be the same as this game: Tell me something we don’t already know.”
That game was Monday’s national championship between Alabama and Georgia, marking the second time in the playoff era and third occasion in the last 11 years that two SEC teams have squared off for the title.
This year’s championship game occurred against the backdrop of a chaotic period in college sports with the NCAA receding from power, schools scrambling to adapt to a more deregulated environment, conferences bracing for an uncertain future and players in a more advantageous position than ever with the ability to profit off their name, image and likeness and transfer more freely between schools.
Meanwhile, the College Football Playoff itself will be overhauled with expansion from four to 12 teams the likely outcome. Because the conferences have not yet agreed on all the details of a playoff overhaul, it might not be implemented before the 2026 season, when its current contract expires.
The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic to the birth of the 12-team playoff will likely bracket the most transformational era in the history of college sports, with major changes occurring at an almost unimaginable pace.
But the one steady drumbeat over the last decade has been the SEC’s ability to concentrate power through its performance on the football field, a point that was underscored yet again in the semifinals on New Year’s Eve when Alabama throttled Cincinnati, 27-6, and Georgia cruised past Big Ten champion Michigan, 34-11.
Monday marked the SEC’s third title in a row, its fifth of the Playoff era and its 12th in the last 16 years. In many ways, the four-team playoff system was designed specifically to loosen the SEC’s grip on the sport. Instead, it’s only made it stronger.
“We’re fine with four,” Sankey said last month in an appearance on Finebaum’s show, while also noting that he favored expansion to 12, a format where the SEC could potentially get three or four teams in every year.
Either way, the SEC wins.
You can trace the SEC’s current dominance as a football conference to 2006, when Urban Meyer’s underdog Florida team blitzed Ohio State, 41-14, displaying superior speed, physicality and offensive innovation. That set the table for Nick Saban’s historic run at Alabama, which continues to this day after six national championships.
But at no point has the competitive gap looked bigger at the top, where only a small handful of programs outside the SEC are equipped to win the national championship in terms of proximity to talent, ability to recruit nationally and institutional willingness to throw almost unlimited funds at their football product.
With most of the recruiting done for the incoming 2022 class, SEC teams occupy 12 of the top 25 spots in the 247 Sports composite rankings. That includes non-marquee teams like Kentucky (No. 11) and Missouri (No. 12), while the top end of the SEC continues to gorge on elite talent. This year alone, Texas A&M, Alabama and Georgia have signed a combined 14 players rated as five-star prospects. The entire Big Ten has signed four.
The sense that the SEC has separated from the pack both competitively and financially, with only the Big Ten in the same revenue-generating stratosphere, has not been healthy for the sport’s competitive balance or future stability.
Cincinnati and Michigan this year became just the 12th and 13th schools to make the CFP in eight years. Only Alabama, Georgia, Clemson, Ohio State, LSU and Oregon have reached the championship game in this format.
Though there are a multitude of reasons why television ratings for the CFP have trended downward, hitting new lows this year with fewer than 17 million viewers for each semifinal, it would be impossible to ignore the lack of diversity and the heavy concentration of power in the South as a contributing factor.
“It’s becoming more of a regional sport than it’s ever been,” Finebaum said. “Outside of a handful of campuses, a very small number, you just can’t will yourself to have an elite program. By elite, I don’t mean making the playoffs; I mean winning playoff games, and that’s really been the problem. Outside of Ohio State and Notre Dame, who got (into the playoff ) a couple times, I don’t see anyone out there who’s making any inroads.”
The most significant consequence of the SEC’s stranglehold on the sport occurred last July, when word leaked that Texas and Oklahoma had secretly negotiated to leave the Big 12 and join the SEC.
Though the date of their departure is still in flux — they could still play as many as three more seasons in the Big 12 — the addition of two more superpowers to the SEC was a supernova event for college sports that sparked a wave of realignment up and down the landscape.
It was also an acknowledgement that even for two of the biggest brands in college athletics, it was becoming too difficult to overcome the advantages the SEC has built.
“It surprised me and makes the SEC even stronger than what they are right now academically and athletically,” said Mike Alden, the former Missouri athletics director who helped lead his school’s transition from the Big 12 to the SEC alongside Texas A&M in 2012. “But it also put a little smile on my face. We got lit up a little bit, especially by Texas, when we made that move. They figured out they better join the neighborhood Missouri and Texas A&M were a part of.”