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SEC Sports
Opinion: The SEC might be bad this year, but for Georgia and Alabama, that won't matter
The SEC enjoys touting itself as college football's toughest league, but early losses have thrown it into doubt. That may help Alabama and Georgia.
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There have been plenty of years recently when the first weekend of college football season has inspired the Southeastern Conference to collectively puff out its chest in arrogance, a trend that has been used to great effect in building a mythology around the league’s top-to-bottom dominance.
But even the SEC’s more shameless propagandists had a hard time spinning Week 1 as a big success this year after some miserable out-of-conference performances by Ole Miss, South Carolina, Missouri and Tennessee, who delivered the coup de grace of Week 1 ineptitude by losing to Georgia State.
In a way, even more is at stake in Week 2. With LSU playing a massive game at Texas and Texas A&M traveling to No. 1 Clemson this weekend, one of two narratives will likely take hold: Either the SEC gets to punch back at the critics who are calling the league overrated or it will be fairly clear that it’s really just Alabama/Georgia and a bunch of pretty average and bad teams.
These arguments about conference supremacy, however, feel more like a relic of the BCS era in college football and not particularly relevant to what happens with the College Football Playoff. In fact, at this point, it may be better for the SEC’s playoff aspirations if it had just two good teams and 12 others who couldn’t run a basic dive play without tripping over the line of scrimmage.
Until proven otherwise, the CFP selection committee places a high value on two things, in exactly this order: 1) Power conference teams having zero or one loss, and 2) Winning a conference championship. Which means the worst thing for any league, including the SEC, would be having a bunch of top-10 caliber teams that are more likely to beat up on each other rather than have one emerge unscathed.
There was no better example of this than the Playoff in 2017. Think about what happened that year to Auburn. Even after losing close road games at Clemson and LSU early in the season, Auburn rebounded to beat Georgia and Alabama to win the SEC West, a division with four teams that ended the year in the top 20.
And what was their reward? Having to play Georgia again in the SEC championship game and losing by three touchdowns, thus taking Auburn out of playoff contention.
At this point, you might be thinking, “Yeah but isn’t that the only year the SEC got two teams in the Playoff?” Yes it was! But here’s where it gets tricky. On the day the Playoff field was selected, Auburn had played four games against teams ranked in the top five and went 2-2.
Alabama, by virtue of not having to face Georgia at all in the regular season, had played just one opponent ranked in the top 15 — Auburn — and lost.
The message sent that day, and by some other committee decisions like having one-loss Ohio State and Washington in the playoff over two-loss Big Ten champs Penn State in 2016 is that a tough conference schedule doesn’t necessarily help you if it increases your chances of taking a loss.
Likewise, having just one or two good teams sitting atop an otherwise bad conference doesn’t really matter if you win all the games. Just ask Clemson.
And given the current schedule structure of the SEC with 14 teams, meaning the best teams from the East and West divisions aren’t going to play each other unless the calendar falls just right, whether it’s the best league doesn’t matter. If Georgia and Alabama each end up at 12-0 in Atlanta, there’s a decent chance they’ll both get into the Playoff regardless of what the rest of the league has done.
But old habits die hard, and the SEC has years of investment tied up in the old narrative that getting through its conference schedule was a gauntlet unlike anything else in college sports. Often, that was true. By the time Florida got to the BCS championship game in 2006, it had already beaten a nine-win Tennessee team, an LSU team that finished No. 3, a nine-win Georgia team and a 10-win Arkansas team with Darren McFadden. By comparison, Ohio State was a piece of cake.
But expanding the SEC to 14 has unquestionably watered down the league schedule — Georgia, for instance, is just now playing Texas A&M for the first time since the Aggies joined the league in 2012. And while the creation of the Playoff was intended to give more weight to teams playing strong schedules, the truth is that having one or two big wins with no losses has been better than playing four or five really tough games and losing two of them.
Until that happens, it’s hard to build an argument that the strength of a conference really matters much at all. Dominance from one or two teams, in fact, is probably preferable.
Flattery by transitive property has been a staple of the SEC for so long, though, that the schadenfreude from Big Ten and Big 12 fans will be strong if Texas A&M and LSU flop in their big non-conference games this weekend.
But if that happens, the reality will be exactly the same as it was before the season started: The only thing that can knock the SEC out of the Playoff is parity.
