Nick Saban claims Ohio State star confirmed that SEC bias is warranted

College football media has been dominated of late by a debate over strength of schedule — which College Football Playoff hopefuls have it, and which don't. On one side is the Big Ten, which currently occupies four of the top five spots in the latest CFP rankings despite the fact that Oregon, Ohio State, Penn State and Indiana have combined for just five wins over teams currently ranked in the top 25. On the other is the SEC, which looks at that number and argues that two-loss teams like Georgia, Alabama, Ole Miss and Tennessee shouldn't be punished for playing in the best conference in the country.

Round and round they've gone over the last several weeks, with no real way to actually settle things on the field until the regular season ends. But it turns out that this debate isn't really a debate at all. Even one of the best players on one of the Big Ten's best teams has apparently conceded that there's nothing quite like the gauntlet of the SEC.

Even Ohio State's best players think the SEC is a tougher grind than the Big Ten

Caleb Downs is in a unique position to compare the two. The star safety was a key member of Alabama's defense during last year's run to the CFP semifinals, then transferred to Ohio State in the wake of Nick Saban's departure. He's almost all the way through a Big Ten schedule just one year after playing in the SEC, and it seems like he'd choose the latter every time.

During College GameDay on Saturday morning, Saban revealed that he'd recently had a conversation with his former player in which the topic of strength of schedule had come up. "We were talking about the SEC and how many hard games we had," Saban said. "[Downs] said we were more well-prepared for games like that [at Alabama]. When we went to Oregon [at Ohio State], we had four easy games, or five easy games, so we weren't really well-prepared to have to go play a 60-minute game against a good team."

There are some caveats here. Oregon was Ohio State's third conference game of the year, after easy wins over Michigan State and Iowa; had the Buckeyes played the Ducks are playing, say, Penn State on the road, Downs may have felt differently. And it's worthy noting that the Buckeyes' non-conference schedule this season was affected by conference realignment.

Still, that's a pretty damning thing to say about your own schedule, and hammers home just how top-heavy the Big Ten has been this season. Teams like Iowa and Michigan State, which have been reasonably competitive in the recent past, haven't been up to par in 2024, and there's not much of a middle class to replace them. Which doesn't mean that Ohio State, or Oregon, or even Indiana aren't good enough to compete with Alabama or Georgia on a neutral field. But it does mean that they've had a much easier road to get here, a reality that the current CFP rankings don't really reflect.