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What national writers, columnists are saying about the SEC
By Jordan Cox
Published:
After a thrilling regular season during which nine teams were in the top 10 at one time or another, and four teams spent time in the top four of the College Football Playoff rankings, the SEC collapsed during bowl season.
The conference went 7-5, its Western Division just 2-5. The SEC won just two games against ranked teams and lost all of its New Year’s Six appearances.
As if the conversation and debate regarding the SEC weren’t intense enough, it has reached a critical mass this week in the wake of the league’s disappointing bowl season.
Here is what some national writers are saying about the SEC:
ESPN’s Edward Aschoff tells how the gap is closing on the SEC and why that’s good for the sport.
The SEC is hurting, but the sport is flourishing. The league — more specifically the SEC West — took one on the chin this postseason, and it might have lost the benefit of the doubt in future playoffs. But that’s fine. Maybe we’ll see beefier non-conference schedules. Maybe it will make things that much more exciting late in the season moving forward.
Fox Sports’ Clay Travis expounds upon a few stats lost in the shouting of the SEC’s disappointment.
If you only listened to the gleeful tap dances of derogation emanating from many national commentators who have been waiting nearly a decade to hastily pronounce the SEC’s eulogy, you’d think the best conference in football went 0-12 in the recently completed bowl season. The SEC’s standard of excellence is so high right now that merely equaling the most wins in the history of bowl games is a disappointment.
SEC Network analyst Tony Barnhart writes in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution that while the SEC did fall flat this bowl season, the reports of its demise are exaggerated.
If the standard for defining dominance moving forward is going to be winning seven out of eight national championships, then the SEC’s dominance “is” over. Since teams now have to win two games instead of one to hold up the trophy, then the basic math tells you no conference will ever be that dominant again. That’s only logical.
But if you think that a tough stretch of bowl games over three days signals the end of the SEC as we have known it, then you haven’t been paying attention or you’re engaging in wishful thinking.
An editorial in the Chicago Tribune revels in the Big Ten’s appearance in the national championship game.
For a long time, the Southeastern Conference has been to college football what Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar was to ordinary humans: “He doth bestride the narrow world like a Colossus.” It often seemed as though it existed on a level all its own, below only the NFL.
… So allow us a moment to gloat about Thursday’s Sugar Bowl, which was supposed to be a mere formality for unstoppable Alabama on its way to the College Football Playoff championship game on Jan. 12.
The Orlando Sentinal’s David Whitley urges SEC fans to not worry, that the league will rebound.
The whole SEC-is-Over premise is based more on wishful thinking than hard evidence. Bowls are one-off vacations where players often forget to pack their motivation. But if you want to use bowls as corroboration — and SEC critics do — the Big 12 went 2-5 and the Big Ten went 5-5. The SEC, in this terrible year, went 7-5. In the 16 years of the BCS, the SEC was 3-9 against the Big East/AAC. So based on bowls, UConn, West Virginia, Temple and UCF should have won nine national titles instead of all those Southern-fried frauds.
After living in Birmingham, Ala., Jordan left the ground zero of SEC Nation to head south to Florida to tell the unique stories of the renowned tradition of SEC football. In his free time, his mission is to find the best locales around.
