SEC football a joke for continuing to play FCS opponents

The SEC says it has no plans to cease football games against FCS opponents, and that’s a major problem in the college game.

For the last 10 seasons in college football, the SEC has been the dominant conference, bringing home eight national championships, including Alabama’s last year. It has put the conference on another level in the eyes of both diehard college football fans and those who don’t pay attention to the sport at all.

Those titles have created a common perception that the conference is the toughest in the FBS subdivision. With SEC teams beating up on each other, to the point where only two of the conference’s recent championships have been won by undefeated teams, the fact the schools continue to schedule games against teams from the FCS subdivision has been excused.

While the Big Ten eliminated such games for their teams, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey says there are no such plans to do that with his 14 member schools:

"“Our schedule is set up across the season, rather than toward the end, so each conference is allowed to have its scheduling philosophy. …“There’s relatively speaking a limited number of those FCS games. Some of those are quite challenging opponents, relatively speaking. But we have not had a hard and fast discussion about eliminating those opportunities.”"

Yes, there are plenty of competitive games between the SEC and those schools from the lower subdivision. I mean, Chattanooga is perfectly capable of beating Alabama… and Wofford could take out Ole Miss… even Alabama A&M could win their in-state battle against Auburn. But on the day anyone of those things happen, pigs will fly out of the stadium and unicorns will take the field.

I’ll give some of the schools in the SEC a little bit of credit: Alabama does play USC, South Carolina plays Clemson, LSU plays Wisconsin and both Florida and Ole Miss play Florida State this year. It isn’t as if all four non-conference games for each SEC program is against the Ivy League or the Pioneer League.

That being said, why is it so hard for these schools to schedule some Group of Five conference programs instead of going down a subdivision? Would it really hurt Texas A&M to schedule a game against UNLV (or even, oh I don’t know, Texas) instead of playing Prarie View A&M? Can’t Florida play Miami (renewing that rivalry) or even a Sun Belt Conference school instead of Presbyterian?

SEC schools say they need to play at least one easy game because of the difficulty that comes with playing their season-long schedule. While no one is doubting the SEC is a tougher conference as a whole than the MAC, for example, if you are supposed to be a level above everyone else, shouldn’t you be able to play a tougher schedule than anyone else?

Michigan head coach Jim Harbaugh got it right when he called out SEC coaches for not wanting to allow satellite camps to continue: the SEC wants all the fame and glory and accomplishments, but doesn’t want to work for it anymore.

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