The SEC Lost the College Football Playoff
Photo by Chris Graythen/Getty Images
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