Players hold up an SEC logo sign in this undated photo at the SEC Championship Game.
Players hold up an SEC logo sign in this undated photo at the SEC Championship Game.
Trivia lightning round: Which conference has won the most college football national championships?
It’s not the Southeastern Conference.
It’s not the Big Ten.
It’s not the Pac-12 or the ACC, for sure.
It’s the Ivy League, with 48 national titles. The NCAA recognizes 34 national titles from current SEC schools.
True, Yale was the last Ivy League national champion back in 1927, the year Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs and The Great Flood inundated huge swaths of Louisiana. But the numbers don’t lie. They tell the story that the most powerful league in the game’s formative years was the Ivy.
Times change, and the balance of power has shifted far south of the Ivy League to the SEC. From Cambridge and New Haven to College Station and Gainesville. Largely because of its football prowess — 15 national championships won by six schools since 1996 — the SEC has become not just the most powerful conference now but the most powerful ever. So big that two traditional powers, Texas and Oklahoma, have decided to join and form a 16-school super conference by 2025, unable to resist the SEC’s vast gravitational pull as their own Big 12 lurches toward its potential demise. Or, at least, irrelevance.
The SEC is getting so big, so dominant, it is altering the environment around it to suit itself. According to an ESPN report earlier this month, SEC commissioner Greg Sankey was so miffed at the inability of the College Football Playoff powers to expand the CFP from four to eight or 12 teams, the SEC will discuss conducting its own playoff at its spring meeting this coming week in Destin, Florida.
Is this a real possibility, or just a boast? Some observers, like ESPN college football reporter Heather Dinich, have said they believe it is posturing on the SEC’s part, a threat perhaps intended to drive the conferences that reportedly blew up the CFP expansion agreement — the Big 12, ACC and Pac-12 — back to the bargaining table (it takes a unanimous vote of 11 conferences to change the current CFP contract, which runs through 2025). Or simply drive them under the tread of the SEC’s tanks as the conference gets bigger and stronger.
Much to the chagrin of fans in conferences like the Big 12, ACC and Pac-12, plus of course the Big Ten, the SEC is the big dog on the block. It has been and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. But that doesn’t mean that holding its own eight-team playoff is a good idea.
It sounds great. If you can’t beat ‘em (into submission), if the other leagues and schools won’t play the game how you want it played, invent another game.
But there is a flaw in this idea. Say the SEC goes through three rounds of an eight-team playoff as has been suggested. Then what? Entry into the CFP? Or the SEC just declares its champion the biggest and baddest and goes home, leaving Ohio State and Southern California and Notre Dame and Clemson to squabble over the leftover scraps.
An SEC-only title, if that’s the plan, would lack legitimacy. The SEC certainly might win the CFP anyway — LSU, Alabama and Georgia have won the past three titles — but you have to at least take on all comers. And if you want to make your teams run a three-round gauntlet to then get to the CFP, where the SEC champ would play one or two more games, you’re suddenly talking about a 17-game season. The equivalent of the NFL’s new regular season.
Think the SEC’s newly emboldened student-athletes, with their megabucks NIL deals and potential new schools just a phone call via the transfer portal away, might not balk at that? Because I do.
The SEC should pull up a beach chair in Destin this week, grab a book and some sunscreen and a cocktail with an umbrella in it, look out into the Gulf of Mexico and consider the hubris of creating its own playoff. Then de-consider it, if it ever really has been a thing that might happen.
The SEC and its growing legion of schools may feel on top of the world now, with none of them imagining that it could ever change, and that whatever they want to do they can do.
They may be right. But 100 years ago, that’s certainly what they were thinking in the Ivy League, too. They certainly couldn’t have imagined a league that still hadn’t been invented yet (the SEC was formed in 1933) from the sleepy South would one day consider not only altering the playing field, but creating its own.
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