SEC Football Dominance Has Been Laid to Rest

SEC football has been cock of the walk for nearly a decade now, but that dominance has been firmly laid to rest.

Let me open by saying that I signed up to write this column days ago, before I had any idea how the events of Dec. 31, 2014 and Jan. 1, 2015 would unfold. It my intention to write about how the grip of the SEC on football dominance was slipping…that was before we saw the giant pile of steaming dung the conference would leave trailing them over the New Year’s holiday.

Regardless of whether they are falling or have fallen from the top as a conference, this was never intended to be an indictment of the SEC suddenly becoming bad at playing football, but more a realization that other teams and other conferences had caught up.

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Everything ends, and nobody stays on top forever in any sport (just ask the guys wearing garnet and gold from Tallahassee), so the eventual toppling of the SEC was inevitable. And despite what some may think, this has not been a sudden occurrence in 2014-15, some of us saw it beginning last season…but no one wanted to listen then (more on that later).

Well, maybe you’ll listen now.

When you win using the same formula, same methodology and same mantra every year, people are going to imitate and catch up to you.

And as I said, my original thought was that I would point out some of the failings of the SEC to do their usual work during the regular season, and to punctuate that with a couple of bowl upsets.

Did I say couple?

The Big Ten, largely considered to be the weakest of the Power-5 conferences this year (and who, by the way, I said could redeem themselves during this bowl season) is playing four SEC teams in bowl games, right now they are 2-1, including Ohio State’s upset(?) win over No. 1 Alabama.

A few years ago, the idea that the Ohio State Buckeyes could come into a championship-level game with a 3rd string quarterback, with exactly one start under his belt, and beat Alabama was laughable.

But it happened. I saw it. You saw it. Rub your eyes and check your blood for hallucinogens all you like, it happened. And this happened not because Alabama is bad. They aren’t. The 2014 Crimson Tide team is as good as any Alabama team that has been fielded in the last decade.

Ohio State was simply better.

Urban Meyer did exactly what he said he was going to do, and took a premier Big Ten program and turned it into a Midwest version of an SEC team. That Buckeyes team that beat Alabama last night was nothing more than the 2008 Florida Gators dressed in scarlet.

And it’s not just against the Big Ten where the SEC has been taken to task in bowl games this year. In total, the SEC sits at 5-5 in their bowl appearances…with the mighty SEC West being trampled to the tune of a 2-5 record. Mississippi State, Ole Miss, Alabama, Auburn and LSU all losing, with four of those teams having occupied a Top 5 spot in the rankings at some point during the season.

Now, it’s natural that the echoing chants of O-VER-RA-TED are going to replace the familiar S-E-C all over the land, but the truth is, the SEC hasn’t been overrated at all. Other teams have simply been underrated, and not given the credit they are due.

We saw against Florida State just how devastating and machine-like the Oregon Ducks have become. No longer are they just a “fast team” who relies on a fleet-footed running back or quarterback to dazzle opponents. They have power, strength and speed up and down their roster, and they are as opportunistic as a fox in a chicken coop.

TCU absolutely annihilated Ole Miss by beating them at their own defensive game (as well as playing a little Horned Frogs football on offense). The Rebels are a good team, with a proven defense…TCU was just up to the task.

The Mississippi State Bulldogs — who were one loss away from being in Alabama’s unfortunate position — found out that the triple-option isn’t just a gimmick when run by a team who does it well, and that even with a month to prepare for Georgia Tech, they still couldn’t stop it.

Everyone is doing it the way the SEC has done it for so long – power, speed and tough-as-nails defense.

The Crimson Tide, Bulldogs and Rebels didn’t demonstrate that the SEC is (and has been) overrated. No, they proved that everything is cyclical, and that the cycle of SEC dominance has come to a close for a while.

The Pac-12 and Big Ten will now be represented in the national championship game. For the first time since 2005 the SEC doesn’t even have a horse in the race at the end, and for the second straight season a team from a conference besides the SEC will get to call themselves national champs.

Which brings me back to my earlier point of seeing the impending downfall last season, which had less to do with Auburn (a team who probably didn’t belong there) losing the BCS National Championship game to Florida State. It was a theme all season long.

The 2013 Auburn Tigers were a team blessed with luck, a lot of luck. No, I mean like the kind of luck leprechauns wish they had. But the rest of the conference just didn’t have their usual swagger, and you didn’t have that feeling of games being over before your frozen pizza was even in the oven.

Oh, they were good as a conference, no doubt about it. But the level of competition was beginning to catch up, and it was never more evident than in the bowl matchups last season. A mediocre Georgia Tech team gave Ole Miss all they could handle in the Music City Bowl. Duke took what was supposed to be a dominant Texas A&M team down to the wire in the Chick-fil-A Bowl, and Iowa…yes IOWA…nearly upset LSU in the Outback Bowl.

Then you had Georgia, playing Nebraska for the second straight year in a bowl, and having their highly-touted run game completely stuffed by the Cornhuskers in a loss. The two teams with very similar rosters from the previous year, when Georgia completely destroyed the Huskers, had a very different outcome in their second straight meeting.

No, the writing was on the wall last season for those who cared to read it.

Defenders of the realm and carriers of the SEC torch will staunchly deny that the run is over (much in the same way that Jameis Winston denied that FSU was stopped by Oregon), and that’s to be expected. Nobody wants to admit that their time on top is at an end, and when you are essentially forced to abdicate power, it makes it even tougher.

But over it is. The SEC-is-King-of-Football era has come to a close. They’ll still have great teams, and undoubtedly Alabama and others out of the conference will have their shot at the playoffs next season, but nobody will be saving a seat at the table for them.

Where does the power shift now? Looks to be more evenly distributed to me. Oregon, TCU, Ohio State and Georgia Tech have shown that every conference has a team that could be right there in the mix next season.

And as bad as it might be for SEC fans, that type of parity is actually better for college football.

Thanks for the memories, Southeastern Conference, and for giving the rest of the nation something to rally their vitriol around. The 2015 Sugar Bowl saw more than just a passing of the torch, it saw the end of an era.

Next: Historically ranking the greatest SEC football programs