Who’s Afraid of The Big Bad Sec?

     The SEC is the most dominant conference in college football.  Just ask a sportscaster.  They’ll all sing the same song.  Argue, and they’ll throw numbers at you.  And the numbers never lie, right?  This year, the SEC was 43-5 against non conference opposition, outscoring them 1,896 to 745.  Don’t bother with the calculator; that’s an average score of 40-15.  Awful lot of National titles coming from down there of late, too.  Eight teams headed to bowls this year.  Granted, damn near all of them are 7-5, but that’s just because the SEC is just so goshdarn tough, and all of those superior teams really hand it to each other…

     When will this madness end?  The SEC is not the best conference in the country.  Not even close, in all honesty.  But we’ll get to that in a bit.  First thing’s first.  We need to assign blame.  The media has been all moony eyed over the SEC since, oh… about the 2006 season.  And one man is personally responsible:  Current Miami Dolphins and former Ohio State wide reciever Ted Ginn, Jr.

     Let’s flash back for a moment to that 2006 season.  Ohio St came into the title game against Florida as a juggernaut.  An unstoppable machine, by all appearances.  Troy Smith had just won the Heismann.  And that offense was all but unstoppable.  And it centered around the aforementioned Ginn.  He hasn’t amounted to much as a pro, but at OSU he was a terror; a threat to but a huge play at any given point.  Defenses were terrified of him and his mind bending (4.2) speed, and as such forced to respect it on every play.  Which allowed a decent running back (Antonio Pittman) to look like Eddie George.  You simply couldn’t load up the line to stop him, because Smith was accurate enough that he would kill you with Ginn.  Throw in an Offensive line comprised of dinosaurs and a solid stable of other receivers, and it really was unstoppable. 

     The game itself comes, and 15 seconds in Ginn is running a kick back for a touchdown… and then he got hurt.  The entire complexion of the game changed.  Florida no longer had to respect the speed of Ginn, and loaded up the box.  The Buckeyes couldn’t run, and when they tried to throw, the Gators threw the house at Smith.  At that point, everyone realized just how much a product of the offense Smith was.  He hadn’t felt pressure all year, and without the security blanket Ginn provided, he crumbled.  The fundamental essence of the offense was gone.  Not many teams are going to overcome that, and the Buckeyes didn’t.  The bottom fell out, and the Gators ran away to the National title.  That isn’t to say the Buckeyes would have won had Ginn not gotten hurt, but there’s a decent chance.  At the least, it wouldn’t have been a blowout like that.

     And so the love affair with the SEC was born.  They were suddenly bigger, faster, and stronger.  Next year, we found Ohio State in a title game against a SEC team again.  Only this OSU team had no business being there.  In what was a rebuilding year (half the team had gone pro) they wound up in the title game due to the most unrealistic season of college football ever played, and got outclassed by an LSU team that was simply much better than they were.  Two in a row, and the SEC was Reigning supreme.  Throw in Florida’s title last year (Nothing to say to criticize that one; they were the best team in the land) and people are shouting ‘Best ever!’

     Fast forward back to today, and this year’s SEC.  Riding that wave of sentiment, the SEC has fooled us all.  Is Alabama the best team in the nation?  Without a doubt.  And barring a small miracle, they will dismantle Texas and take home that crystal football.  But the rest of the conference?  Garbage.  Of the eight teams in a bowl, fully half of them have absolutely no business being there.   The figures I mentioned earlier… 43-5, average score 40-15… are utterly misleading.  What the SEC has done, friends, is pull the wool over our collective eyes.  Here’s how.

     Here are the SEC teams’ non conference records for 2009.

Florida 4-0

Alabama 4-0

LSU 4-0

Ole Miss 4-0

Tennessee 4-0

South Carolina 4-0

Kentucky 4-0

Arkansas 4-0

Auburn 4-0

Georgia 3-1

Mississippi St 2-2

Vanderbilt 2-2.

     Impressive, isn’t it?  But let’s break it down a bit more.  Let’s look at it game by game.  Before each game, you’ll see the Sangarin ranking of the opposing team. I know, the SEC defenders here will cry out that Sangarin isn’t official, blah blah blah.  But keep in mind even he has the SEC ranked as the #1 conference.  And while you can argue that it’s not completely accurate, it’s safe to assume that if he has a team ranked at #231, they probably suck and have no business playing a top tier SEC team.  So let’s look…

Alabama:

#7 Virginia Tech 34-24

#140 Florida International 40-14

#162 North Texas 53-7

#143 Tennessee Chatanooga 45-0

Florida:

#184 Charleston Southern  62-3

#69 Troy  56-6

#140 Florida International  62-3

#44 Florida State 37-10.

LSU

#42 Washington 31-23

#128 Louisiana Lafayette 31-3

#142 Tulane 42-0

#83 Louisiana Tech  24-16

Ole Miss

#129 Memphis 45-14

#176 Southeast Louisiana 52-6

#98 UAB 48-13

#126 Northern Arizona 38-14

Tennessee

#192 Western Kentucky 63-7

#43 UCLA 19-15

#77 Ohio 34-23

#129 Memphis 56-28

Georgia

#32 Oklahoma State 10-24 L

#60 Arizona State 20-17

#182 Tennessee Tech 38-0

#9 Georgia Tech 30-24

     It pretty much looks the same all the way down.  The average rank of an SEC non conference opponent?  103.  With the exception of Georgia, every single team in the SEC played at least 2 teams ranked #100 or lower.  Four teams played 3 of them, including Alabama.  The total number of top 25 non conference opponents played?  2.    

     And while the rest of us drool over how great the SEC is, they go into conference play and what you end up with is a bunch of mediocre teams playing mediocre football.  Meanwhile, the sports machine tells us that they’re all beating each other because they’re all so good.  It’s brilliant, really.  Send just about every team into conference play with 4 wins against virtual high school teams, figuring most of them will find 2 or 3 wins somewhere in conference.  Send just about the whole crew to bowls, sit back and get paid.  Meanwhile, we all tell TCU and Boise State that if they want a piece of the pie, they need to schedule ‘real’ non conference opposition.  TCU knocks off Virginia and Clemson,  Boise State takes out Rose Bowl bound Oregon, and Alabama and Florida play Douchebag State over and over and get to play for the big one while TCU and Boise get sent to the corner to play with each other.

     Perhaps it’s time we all see the SEC for what it is;  A farce.  Just another conference.

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