PASADENA, Calif. — With due respect to the College Football Playoff committee, it is time for all of us to show a little humility and concede the SEC was right.
Not all conferences are created equal.
The Big Ten — and the north — is in a class of its own.
What else to make of these delicious past few weeks?
After the SEC — coaches, fans, commentators — threw a toddler-in-the-checkout-line tantrum that its three-loss teams didn’t make the playoffs over reputed frauds such as Indiana, the league proved to be nothing more than the crowd of overserved hold-me-back frat bros.
Great in hypothetical matchups. Not so much in actual ones.
In reality, Michigan — without most of its top players — just beat one shoulda-made-it southern team for the second time in a calendar year (Alabama), Illinois beat another (South Carolina), and the Big Ten is now 4-1 against the SEC this postseason.
What’s more, Ohio State — fresh off its annihilation of Oregon in the Rose Bowl here Wednesday, which followed its annihilation of the team that finished second in the SEC (Tennessee) — looks very much like the cream of the country.
And the northern teams joining the Buckeyes in the Final Four — Penn State and Notre Dame — aren’t half bad, either.
How about the Irish doing the Midwest proud Thursday in their bullying 23-10 win over Georgia in the Sugar Bowl?
S-E-Cya.
Now, all the SEC has left is Texas, which just joined the league this year and needed the help of a favorable call to squeak past Arizona State in its playoff quarterfinal.
At the Cotton Bowl next week, the Buckeyes will not only have the chance to continue on toward a national title.
They have the opportunity to send the south into a full-blown state of football mourning.
No wonder you can’t spell identity crisis without S-E-C.
You just hate to see it!
Now, we’re having a little fun here, and you can argue bowl results — especially in this turnstile era — are not a good measure of conference supremacy. (Everyone knows they only count when the SEC wins.)
Let us also roll our eyes at the fictive narrative that the SEC is a media creation. It counts 13 of the past 18 national champions and produces mountains of NFL draft picks. Its reputation as the best conference is earned.
But nothing lasts forever.
While I hesitate to let facts get in the way, I might remind that two current Big Ten teams played for the national title last year — Michigan beat Washington — and there’s a good chance we’ll see it again this season.
It’s time for the south — and those fighting its football war — to stop living in the past.
You can argue the reasons for the flattening of the football earth, and, no, it’s not as simple as everyone can pay players now. Spare us the Big Ten sanctimony.
Inarguable are the results.
At least, the Big Ten is every bit the SEC’s equal, and it is comical to revisit the argument that there were a raft of southern teams that would have made a better playoff.
Recall the uproar after Notre Dame’s 27-17 win over Indiana.
“Really exciting competitive game @CFBPlayoff,” Mississippi head coach Lane Kiffin posted on X. “Great job!!”
"Indiana was outclassed,” ESPN analyst Kirk Herbstreit said. “It was not a team that should've been on that field when you consider other teams that could've been there. … We’ve got to move forward with the playoff and hope the committee does a better job of weighing who the best 12 [teams] are as opposed to who's the most deserving.”
The implication: No. 11 Alabama and its three-loss SEC peers (South Carolina and Ole Miss) all would have been better options because … because. Don’t talk back to your father!
The argument was these teams belonged in over one-loss Indiana because they had navigated a superhuman gauntlet.
The reality: Leave the SEC echo chamber, and you can see the league is just like the Big Ten, with a couple really good teams (Georgia and Texas), then a bunch of solid teams, a bunch of blah, and a bunch of crap.
Alabama and South Carolina didn’t miss the playoffs because they played a Murderer’s Row schedule. They missed them because they weren’t very good. Between them, they lost to the schools that finished 11th, 12th, 13th, and 15th in the SEC, then fell to middle-class Big Ten opponents in the postseason.
If you want to make the case for them, you’re living in fantasyland.
Just like anyone else who still thinks the SEC is best in show.
First Published January 3, 2025, 2:18 a.m.
