Is the SEC undergoing a drain of excellence?
Parody or parity?
By Buddy Martin
They have thrown out the bathwater and now they’re coming for the baby!
Apparently, there is nothing sacred left about college football, or the SEC.
That’s the way one side looks at it. The other side, led by the Matt Barries of the world, thinks we are in the throes of the “greatest football” weeks in history.
Me, I worry that the scavengers have come for what’s left of college football.
As Nick Saban has said, it used to be more important for the Southern teams to win the SEC than the national championship.
The preservation of that tradition seems more important than the money. But then there is this:
ESPN reported that replacing the SEC championship game alone required accounting for an event generating roughly $80 million to $100 million.
I have generally found that when they say “it’s not about the money,” it is, indeed, about the money.
I’m not buying that this playoff on steroids is good for all of college football. Once they started trying to fix college football, they broke it worse.
Does this new 24-team playoff not have the fingerprints of the Big Ten all over it? Well, you betcha, Tony Petitti! But your side has been holding serve now for three years, so I guess it’s losers walk.
A parody is a humorous or satirical imitation of a specific work, author or style, created to mock, critique or comment on the original. Sometimes this whole thing feels like a mockery.
My take: The SEC hasn’t lost excellence. It has lost some of its monopoly on excellence, and a 24-team playoff threatens to make the distinction between “excellent” and “merely pretty good” matter less. Those are related problems, but they aren’t the same problem.
One important clarification on recent news: ESPN reports that a deal for a 24-team playoff beginning in 2027 is nearing completion, pending final approvals. It is not yet a finalized format. The expected changes include eliminating Power Four championship games and starting the season a week earlier.
Have we lost our respect and reverence for tradition?
What’s wrong with the SEC?
First, the decline at the very top is real, not merely nostalgia for when every September came with an Alabama national championship reservation.
Entering this season, the SEC had gone three consecutive seasons without winning a national championship, or even putting a team in the championship game. That followed a stretch of 13 national titles in 17 seasons. Against that standard, a good conference can look like a fallen empire.
But I would separate three things:
A conference with several good teams.
A conference with one or two genuinely great teams.
A conference whose reputation makes us assume those great teams must be there.
The SEC built its reputation by delivering the second. Sometimes we now give it credit for the second merely because it has the first.
This season’s evidence doesn’t suggest excellence has vanished entirely. The Athletic’s Oct. 11 assessment had Georgia at 6-0, followed by Alabama at 5-1 and Texas at 4-1, with Georgia clearly favored in its conference-title projections. That looks more like an uneven league with a leading contender than a league devoid of quality.
Why don’t more teams look great?
Talent is harder to stockpile. NIL and transfer freedom have loosened the traditional powers’ grip on recruiting and roster retention. ESPN’s examination of the SEC’s championship drought and Yahoo’s recent assessment of conference parity both identify that redistribution as an important explanation.
It is harder to build an overwhelming machine when the players who would once have supplied its second wave can find money and playing time elsewhere. That can improve competition without improving the best team. More competitive Saturdays and fewer dominant teams can coexist.
The schedule complicates the picture
The SEC’s nine-game conference schedule arrived this season, adding another league opponent to the annual test. That makes records harder to compare with those from the eight-game era.
But “we beat each other up” cannot become a permanent exemption from scrutiny. A close conference game might mean two excellent teams collided. It might also mean neither could take control. Conference membership doesn’t settle that argument; performance does.
We sometimes confuse parity with quality
Parity tells us the teams are closer together. It does not tell us how high the ceiling is. Is everybody capable of beating somebody, or is somebody capable of beating everybody?
Would 24 teams diminish excellence further?
It would diminish the requirement for sustained excellence more than excellence itself. An outstanding team would still be outstanding. But the system would ask fewer teams to demonstrate that quality week after week before granting them a championship opportunity.
The proposed field under discussion includes 19 at-large selections, the four Power Four conference champions as determined by their leagues, and the highest-ranked Group of Six team. Final details remain unannounced.
That creates several concerns.
1. More chances to recover mean fewer occasions when losing is decisive
There is a legitimate benefit: More fan bases would have meaningful postseason stakes later in the season.
But there is a cost at the top. If a contender can absorb another defeat without seriously endangering qualification, that defeat carries less championship consequence. Seeding can preserve incentives; it cannot completely reproduce the jeopardy of elimination.
The important distinction is between making more games relevant to the bracket and making the biggest games more consequential. Expansion can accomplish the first while weakening the second.
My concern is what follows culturally: Programs could sell a playoff appearance as evidence of excellence when it might represent a respectable season rather than an exceptional one. Conversely, some schools could begin treating otherwise respectable seasons as failures simply because they missed an enlarged field. More participation does not necessarily produce a more sensible definition of success.
2. Losing conference championship games would remove a distinct achievement
Under the deal ESPN describes, Power Four championship games are expected to disappear, although leagues would still determine champions for playoff qualification.
Ugh!
A conference championship ought to have meaning beyond its usefulness in arranging the national bracket. My objection isn’t that the existing title games are perfect. It’s that eliminating them makes the sport even more exclusively about one postseason tournament.
There should be room in college football for a season to mean something other than “advanced” or “eliminated.”
3. The strongest argument against expansion isn’t that every underdog will lose
Some lower seeds would win. An upset would be exciting. Neither point answers whether 24 is the right number.
The better question is: What problem does doubling the field solve that is important enough to justify changing the value of the regular season?
The financial incentive is substantial. During negotiations, ESPN reported that replacing the SEC championship game alone required accounting for an event generating roughly $80 million to $100 million. Revenue and compensation for lost championship games were central to the SEC’s position.
That doesn’t automatically make expansion wrong. But it does mean “better championship competition” and “more valuable television inventory” should not be treated as interchangeable goals.
The SEC’s challenge is to produce teams that restore its competitive authority. Expanding the playoff could give the conference more places to put teams without answering whether those teams are truly exceptional.
That’s the danger: not that excellence disappears, but that college football becomes less demanding about who gets to claim it.
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