The SEC Lost the College Football Playoff

The Southeastern Conference (SEC) is college football’s premier conference both in branding and its talent pool. Being located in the part of the country that typically produces the most good players is helpful to building a good college football program, and dominating the sport with Alabama and Georgia this past decade has reinforced those narratives of the SEC as something different than the rest of college football.

But the SEC is not the end-all, be-all of college football, no matter how many fans south of the Mason-Dixon line believe it to be ordained by the college football gods themselves. There was a lot of righteous indignation around the SEC only getting a paltry three teams in the College Football Playoff’s fourteen-team tournament, and everything that has happened since that hurricane of message board-style bellyaching has been a glorious rebuke to the most entitled conference and its media sycophants at ESPN devoted to its self-serving narrative.

During the opening College Football Playoff game, Notre Dame was semi-blowing Indiana out at halftime, and the crescendo of SEC complaining reached its zenith. Ole Miss’s head coach Lane Kiffin, who lost a winnable game to 10th place SEC finisher Florida with a playoff spot on the line, tweeted to the College Football Playoff account, “Really exciting competitive game. Great job!”

Alabama was the first team out of the tournament, and you would have thought that they were relegated to Division II the way that the ESPNs and Paul Feinbaums of the world reacted to the committee giving the last at large bid to SMU, who actually made their conference championship game. Not satisfied with wanting to steal SMU’s spot for the SEC, ESPN’s Sean McDonough and Kirk Herbstreit threw a temper tantrum and turned their ire to Indiana during their broadcast, who only lost to Ohio State and was the top overachiever in college football this season. They ran into a wall on the road against a really good team still alive in the playoffs, and the internet frenzy sparked by the broadcast’s indignation painted the Hoosiers as frauds who were stealing the SEC’s birthright.

“What was it about [Indiana’s] resume that said they were clearly more deserving than SMU or Alabama?… I think they need to lose the assumption that the SEC and the Big 10 are clearly head & shoulders above everybody else, particularly the Big 10…” – Sean McDonough 🏈🎙️#CFP pic.twitter.com/tPHIjNXGw6

— Awful Announcing (@awfulannouncing) December 21, 2024

But that game at Notre Dame which got everyone’s feathers ruffled in ESPN boardrooms and SEC country was not actually that big of a blowout. The Irish won by ten, and if you take out Jeremiyah Love’s 98-yard touchdown run where the Hoosier defender took a bad angle on what should have been a marginal gain, Notre Dame outgained Indiana by just 18 yards. McDonough calling into question the quality of the SEC’s lone competitor, the Big Ten, looks pretty stupid now that we could very easily have an all-Big Ten National Championship between two teams who have obliterated four opponents so far. Indiana only losing one game all year to a program who has won their two playoff games by a combined score of 83-38 seems like a pretty good resume to me!

Yesterday afternoon, at the Sugar Bowl delayed by the attack on New Orleans that killed at least 14 people and injured dozens more, Notre Dame jumped out to a 17-point lead after halftime against Georgia with a backup quarterback. Are the SEC Champions also fraudulent for finding themselves in the same spot against the Irish that Indiana found themselves in?

Alabama didn’t make the playoff because they lost to freaking Vanderbilt and got curb stomped by an aggressively mediocre Oklahoma team that lost a bowl game to Navy, who still runs an offense from the pre-forward pass era. Ole Miss lost at home to a very bad Kentucky squad and choked away their spot in the playoff at the finish line. Win the games you should win or shut up, losers. Anyone who fumbles the bag against basketball and math schools doesn’t get to whine that their supposedly mighty football team was denied its rightful spot in the playoff.

Alabama further reinforced the SEC’s fraudulence in their bowl game, as they played a first quarter for the ages against Michigan, leading Paul Finebaum to denounce his previous assertion that Alabama is a playoff team. I’m not sure Vanderbilt’s offense has ever opened a game with this kind of sustained clusterfuck, as Alabama ran 16 plays for a total of negative 6 yards, with their first quarter drives ending in a turnover on downs, a fumble, an interception, a fumble, then a punt.

Tennessee got boat raced by the Buckeyes in the first round of the playoff, while Georgia played so bad yesterday, I’m not sure they would have won that game even if star quarterback Carson Beck was healthy. They put up as much of a fight against Notre Dame as Indiana did. Now the SEC’s lone hope to justify its unearned arrogance this season is an impostor who killed the old Big 12 then fled to the safe space of Alabama and Georgia’s shadows.

Given that the oddsmakers peg Texas as a six-point underdog against Ohio State in the semifinal, beating an Arizona State team in double overtime whose best player played injured and who emerged from a four-way tie atop a second-rate conference that Texas helped create could be as good as the first expanded playoff gets for the SEC. As a proud college football hater and fan of a team in the conference that Texas left for dead, this mess just warms my icy heart.

As Ray Ratto so eloquently detailed for Defector, the College Football Playoff is going according to plan. The name-brands this was built for have advanced to the semifinals, and the SEC is learning the harsh truth that they are not the only name-brands in this sport. The all-time college football wins list only has one true SEC team in its top ten (Alabama), and programs like Harvard and Yale have won more games than Georgia. Hell, Division III Wittenberg University has more wins than Auburn does. The beauty of this sport is that it is everywhere, and it means so much to so many small pockets of America. The revulsion many like me feel towards the SEC’s arrogance is rooted in the “SEC!” chanter’s belief that it holds a monopoly on this dynamic.

The SEC is special for a reason, but it’s nice to see it get taken down a peg so aggressively like this. I don’t like rooting for the Big Ten either which also has its head firmly lodged in its colon, but the lone positive value of Ohio State, Penn State and Michigan existing is so that Alabama, Georgia, and LSU’s heads don’t get too big.

Bowl season has demonstrated that there is nowhere to hide for this year’s SEC frauds in Tuscaloosa, and Lane Kiffin can pretend that he’s a big boy by drubbing Duke in an exhibition game while taking shots at Vanderbilt’s quarterback in the middle of it, but he’s just providing more proof that the SEC had its sights set on smaller, less important battles this year, and the legacy SEC crowd is ending the first ever expanded College Football Playoff by reenacting one of the internet’s favorite gifs. Who ever thought that Notre Dame victories could bring so much joy to the world?