Common Man & Company
Did Louisville help prove the SEC isn't all it's made out to be?
High Contrast VersionThat “cyclical” thing in college football may be happening.. Especially if Alabama loses to Notre Dame, and Texas A&M loses to Oklahoma. Just for arguments sake, let’s say that does happen. The “4 best” teams in the SEC will have all lost their bowl games, after LSU lost to Clemson (an underachieving ACC team regardless of what Dabo Sweeney says) and we don’t even have to get into the pounding that Louisville put on Florida.. A team that the “experts” said shouldn’t even be in a BCS bowl game, and perhaps would be the worst BCS bowl team in history if it weren’t for the team the OTHER school in Florida got lucky enough to play when Florida State beat Northern Illinois. So here are some of the numbers which I’ve thought about for a really long time now, the top teams in the SEC are just really good but the conference as a whole isn’t as dominant as people would say. Now I may have even been wrong if the “4 top teams” in the SEC all have bowl losses to “inferior conferences”
While you may have to play one or two extremely tough games if you are an SEC team, the rest of your conference schedule is typically pretty easy. Take Alabama for example, who had to play Texas A&M (lost) and LSU who, like we said, just lost to Clemson. Then Georgia in the SEC champ game who if it weren’t for the black eye, I mean black shirt defense of Nebraska would have lost their bowl game to. Their next toughest game was against a Mississippi State team that just lost to Northwestern...and they also sprinkled in a game against Western Kentucky and Western Carolina.
My point is the SEC is not leaps and bounds ahead of the rest of college football like they are portrayed to be. Teams like Ohio State get blasted for their “non conference schedule” in football when Alabama’s marquee non conference game this year was against a team Ohio State plays ever year, Michigan. Add in the fact that the Big ten had, by record as many bowl eligible teams than the SEC, and the conference has two less teams than the SEC. To me the SEC gets by on reputation and really just beating up on the bad teams in their own league...ie Auburn (3-9), Arkansas (4-8), Kentucky (2-10), Missouri (5-7), and Tennessee (5-7). Those teams had a combined 5 conference wins in the SEC (likely against each other) and you add in the fact the every SEC team pretty much has those 5 wins every year against the subpar teams in their own conference, then they also schedule 2-3 games a year against Western Kentucky, and Western Carolina types, that alone makes you bowl eligible.
The Big 12 had 9 of their teams with 6 wins (making them bowl eligible) and they have a top 5 team in Kansas State, and another team in Oklahoma playing in a big time bowl. So I think that perhaps the rest of college football has already caught up to the SEC, or just maybe, they were never as good as they were sold to be to begin with.
Richard “Pork Chop” Rodawalt
Producer Common Man & Company