The Southeastern Conference has not had a good go of it in this year's bowl season. The conference reached a low point during Thursday night's Sugar Bowl, in which Georgia was pantsed by Notre Dame. It was an odd thing, watching this Notre Dame team that lost to NIU cruise to a 23-10 victory while looking bigger and stronger than their SEC powerhouse opponents.
You can argue that Georgia played better than the score indicates, even though the Bulldogs started QB Gunner Stockton. Stockton was fine, throwing for 234 yards and one touchdown while outplaying his counterpart, Riley Leonard, who threw for just 90 yards and a touchdown. The game was decided in the margins, with Georgia losing two fumbles at critical points and Notre Dame beginning the second half with a 98-yard kick return for a touchdown. Georgia was out-coached and out-schemed, and much of their season's sloppiness finally came back to bite them. Maybe their QB was a deficit, but I would ask anyone making that argument to go watch some Carson Beck tape from this year.
What makes last night's result feel like an indictment of the SEC is that Georgia was the conference's best team. Texas, the only SEC team left in the playoff, lost to them twice and have not exactly dominated in their games. Against both Clemson and Arizona State, the Longhorns let the opponent stay in the game long enough to push them to the brink, with the latter taking them to two overtimes. Some measure of redemption can be had if Texas manages to somehow beat Ohio State next week, which suddenly looks like the best team in the nation. But Texas can only stand up so much for a conference it just joined this season.
And so after Georgia's loss, Tennessee's drubbing by Ohio State, and Texas hanging on for dear life, there are a few questions to be asked about the SEC's status as the sport's most dominant conference. The conference has even taken some hits outside of the playoff: South Carolina lost to Illinois, which provided great meme material, and Michigan dismantled Alabama, another team that many people felt should've made the playoff over a team like SMU.
So, OK, the SEC had a bad showing in a year where no team in the conference really established itself as dominant. Is this a one-off? Is this a sign of trouble? The Big Ten, which was considered down this year after showing promise as the SEC's biggest contender, now has two teams left in the playoff, and boasts a Michigan team that suddenly became dominant again at the end of the season. Is this a trend that will continue?
I don't really know. The popular argument is that the proliferation of NIL and the rules around the transfer portal becoming more lax and favorable to players has diluted the strength of the SEC, leveling the playing field across the country—it's hard to maintain an advantage when suddenly everyone is paying players. Or maybe the other conferences have been catching up to the SEC for awhile now, and it was only media coverage and the whims of the selection committee that kept the idea of its sheer dominance intact. But all of this is purely speculative, without enough data in any direction to make a real case for or against. My sense is that anyone shoveling dirt on the SEC right now is most likely giving in to schadenfreude.
But we deserve the schadenfreude. For too long we've had to live with Greg Sankey, Paul Finebaum, Kirk Herbstreit—who didn't even go to an SEC school!—and ESPN telling us how great the SEC is compared to other conferences. It's not hard to figure why this happened. ESPN is in the business of selling football games, and so it was in its own best interest to boost the profile of SEC teams while the conference was ascendant. I can understand that, and as a southerner, I can understand the appeal of the SEC. Some of the best players in the nation can be found in the south. But as an alumnus of an ACC school, I have spent too much time watching ESPN commenters and sportswriters tie themselves into knots to fight for the SEC, namely its flagship program Alabama, which can never lose badly or often enough to stop its advocates arguing for the Tide's inclusion in the national championship. The propaganda has gotten to be so bad that fanbases within the SEC shout the conference's initials during games, a large-scale equivalent to Rob Lowe's NFL cap.
So yes, dumping on the SEC is mostly an emotional response, but so what? The conference forced everyone else to eat its bull for decades, now it's time for them to feed at the trough. And I want it all: I want 20-minute segments on "What's wrong with the SEC?" I want finger-pointing and panic firings. I want players transferring to other schools where "the competition is higher." I want all the stupidity and lack of nuance for an entire offseason. There was nothing funnier to me IN THE WORLD than last night's broadcast breaking away from Georgia's pitiful performance to show us another "SEC: It Just Means More" commercial. And they're right, by the way. When things are going bad in the SEC, it just stinks more.