The SEC’s Era of Invincibility Is Over
Is the SEC still the king of college football? For the first time in more than 20 years, there is doubt. What does that mean for the culture of the sport—and for the fans who’ve clung to conference superiority so tightly?
We have ourselves a bit of a problem here in the South, the place where I was born and raised and where I now live, work, and raise a child. It’s a problem that’s whispered about in bars, on playgrounds, and in calls to relatives—even in fleeting encounters at roadside restaurants along the highways that funnel us to our vacations on the “Redneck Riviera” all summer long. It’s a problem that most everyone is aware of, but that many would prefer not to talk about, as if by ignoring it, perhaps, it will simply disappear. And, well, the problem is this: For nearly a quarter century, the Southeastern Conference has been the most dominant force in college football, functioning as a multipronged behemoth, swallowing whole any foe from another region of the country who dared to believe it could compete. And yet, after all that time, and all those championships, and all those boastful S-E-C chants that rang out from Lexington to Fayetteville and beyond, there is now a creeping fear that God’s chosen conference is merely very, very, very good.
This, obviously, is unacceptable. “If anyone tells you it doesn’t matter,” says my father-in-law, Allen, a lifelong Alabama fan who talks football to friends and strangers for 12 months out of the year, “they are lying. Of course it matters.”
The evidence of slippage is scant, but powerful. You see, for two whole years in a row, a school from outside the SEC has won the College Football Playoff national title. And for two whole years in a row, the SEC has not even sent a team to the national title game. Last season, Ohio State beat two SEC programs (Tennessee and Texas) en route to the championship. The season before, Michigan beat Alabama in a national semifinal before winning it all. This is not supposed to happen. Since 1998—the first year of the Bowl Championship Series that preceded the 2014 introduction of the playoff era—six different SEC schools have won outright national titles. Between 1969 and 2012, the Big Ten as a conference won an outright title only once. Between 2006 and 2023, the SEC won 13 of 17 national titles. The league’s superiority was so self-evident, so brutal and totalizing, that it took the shape of immutable fact. “It got boring,” says Braden Gall, president of 440 Sports and a sports radio host in Nashville. “It became more fun for SEC fan bases to taunt each other than to taunt everyone else.”
Not anymore. Even the newcomers are getting in on conference pride. At July’s SEC media days in Atlanta, Tulsa World columnist Berry Tramel, who covers a school (Oklahoma) that joined the conference before last season, stood up to ask a question of Alabama coach Kalen DeBoer, who also just joined the league in 2024, when he left Washington for Tuscaloosa.
“The Big Ten has won two in a row,” Tramel said. “How important is it for the SEC, maybe Alabama, maybe someone else, to stop that streak?”
DeBoer nodded, understanding the gravity of the situation. “That’s our responsibility,” he said, “to be at the top right? I know at Alabama, but also the expectation for the SEC as a whole.”
Let’s get something out of the way: The premise of this article might be wildly overblown. We are talking, after all, about the league that has won 16 national championships this century, that just this year tied a record by having 15 players selected in the first round of the NFL draft. This is the league that has more wins and a higher winning percentage than any other conference in playoff games, bowl games, New Year’s Six games, and any other meaningful measurement of interconference competition. Between selection day in 2019 and the start of the season in 2023, no team from outside the SEC was ever ranked no. 1 in the College Football Playoff rankings; during that span, four SEC schools rose to no. 1 (Alabama, Georgia, LSU, and Tennessee). You know what USC, Penn State, Notre Dame, and Florida State have in common? None has ever been ranked no. 1 in the CFP rankings. You know who has? Mississippi damn State.
And yet, as someone who’s spent most of his life in this region and now lives just a brisk walk from the Nashville bars where fans from across the South grow belligerent while watching their teams lose to each other on fall Saturdays (no judgment—my wife once nearly got us kicked out of a brunch restaurant when our Georgia Bulldogs lost to South Carolina in 2019), I have to say: Something feels different this year. There’s a sense of unease in the air. Maybe it’s a general discomfort with the rapid pace of the sport’s change. Or maybe it’s a fear that the past two seasons were not, in fact, a blip. “The real question is, does the SEC have an elite team this year?” longtime voice of the conference Paul Finebaum recently asked on his ESPN radio show. “We don’t know right now.”
Texas enters the season ranked no. 1 in both the AP and coaches’ polls, but lacks any history of winning at the highest levels under head coach Steve Sarkisian. Georgia remains loaded with talent, but has question marks at quarterback, and is coming off the program’s least successful season this decade. Alabama’s roster is tied with Ohio State’s in having the highest blue-chip ratio in the country, but has all of the same unknowns as the Longhorns and Bulldogs. LSU brings back projected top NFL draft pick Garrett Nussmeier and welcomes a loaded transfer class, but the next big game that Brian Kelly wins in Baton Rouge will be the first. Meanwhile, Ohio State has reloaded, Clemson has resurged, and Penn State returns more talent than any other team in the country. Says my father-in-law, Allen: “I would not not take a lie detector test and say that the SEC is hands-down the best. And this is the first time in a long time that that’s the case.”
So, what explains this shifting axis of power? Well, perhaps you may have heard, but the tectonic plates beneath the sport have shifted. “We’re not changing a variable,” says Steven Godfrey, a longtime college football reporter who hosts Yahoo’s College Football Enquirer podcast and whose 2014 story “Meet the Bag Man” was the definitive investigation into college football’s pre-NIL underbelly. “We’re changing three important variables at the same time.”
The first variable is that players are earning money over the table through NIL and revenue sharing, which has dramatically changed the way schools recruit prized players. The second is the transfer portal, which opened in 2018 and has allowed unprecedented levels of player movement between programs. The third is the newly expanded postseason, which went from a four-team to a 12-team format beginning last season.
Those first two factors—the money and the portal—go hand-in-hand. “We’re getting a little bit of an early return on data that suggests that with the portal and NIL you can spread out elite talent a little better,” says Godfrey. For most of this century, the nation’s premier programs could stack loaded recruiting class on top of loaded recruiting class: Florida under Urban Meyer, Alabama under Nick Saban, Georgia under Kirby Smart. They accumulated a depth of talent so unmistakably superior to the competition that their success felt inevitable. “Your three-deep would have five-stars on it,” says Gall.
That kind of roster construction is now nearly impossible. Not that the same programs don’t still recruit at a high level—Alabama is still humming under DeBoer, Georgia is Georgia under Smart, and Texas just netted 247Sports’ top-rated 2025 class under Sarkisian. But talent finds a way of dispersing, usually in search of playing time and NIL opportunities, through the portal. “Let’s say for the sake of argument there were 25 blue-chip college football players in a given year,” says Godfrey. “In the past it felt like 19 of those players were on a roster playing for Nick Saban or Kirby Smart or Urban Meyer. Now it’s a little different. You’re not seeing any team put together the ridiculous NFL-laden rosters that you saw before.”
In 2022, Texas A&M assembled what recruiting services called the greatest recruiting class in college football history. As that class enters its fourth season of college, only six of its 30 members are still in College Station.
Of course, SEC powers don’t just lose players to the portal. They poach them, too. Just look at this past summer, when Oklahoma poached star quarterback John Mateer from Washington State, Georgia brought in do-everything playmaker Zachariah Branch from USC, and Auburn added star receiver Eric Singleton Jr. from Georgia Tech. But the sport’s preeminent programs—Texas, Alabama, and Georgia (plus Ohio State, Oregon, and a few others)—all lose more players to the portal than they add. “You can’t keep the four-star kid who’s good enough to go earn money,” says Gall. “He’s not gonna keep sitting on your bench. So now your roster has shrunk, and the talent is more spread out.”
In an interview with college football commentator Josh Pate from March, Smart said that he watches film of each day of spring practice, then goes back to the two national championship teams, 2021 and 2022, and watches film of those same days of practice in each of those years. The difference he sees is undeniable. “There’s not as much depth,” Smart said of the team now. “There’s much more younger players. There’s not as much attention to detail.”
This is the reality of this era. Rosters like the one that sent five defenders to the NFL draft’s first round and 15 players to the draft in total, like Georgia’s did in 2022, are a lot more difficult to maintain. So when Smart looks at his current team, should he compare his team to previous versions, or should he compare it to the competition on the field? “I have to accept that it’s different now,” he said.
The other key difference is the way the sport determines a champion. For generations, college football used the polls to crown its champion. In the BCS era, an algorithm anointed the top two teams in a given season, and they alone would be given a shot at the title. For the first 10 years of the College Football Playoff, a committee selected the four best teams to compete for glory, and the programs that filled those spots were all too predictable: Alabama (eight appearances), Clemson (six), Ohio State (five), and Georgia (three) either made the field or were one of the first couple of teams left out virtually every season.
Last season’s expansion to 12 completely changed the dynamic. Prior to 2024, an absolutely loaded Ohio State roster that lost its regular-season finale against archrival Michigan wouldn’t have even made the playoff. Instead, the Buckeyes entered the tournament as the no. 8 seed and rounded into championship form as soon as the event began. In fact, all three of the SEC’s playoff teams—Texas, Georgia, and Tennessee—were eliminated by programs that wouldn’t have even qualified for a four-team bracket had it still been in place. The consensus around the sport was that a larger playoff field would only strengthen the SEC’s position, giving the league more title contenders. In year one, the expanded format actually made the league more vulnerable.
The powers that be in the sport are now talking about further expansion. Rumors of a 14- or 16-team playoff started circulating before the inaugural 12-team playoff went into effect. Earlier this month, multiple outlets reported that Big Ten commissioner Tony Pettiti wants to expand the playoff to 28 teams, with a model that would guarantee seven automatic-qualifying bids for both the Big Ten and SEC, along with five apiece for the Big 12 and ACC. The money that would come with such a change would be colossal. The cost, however, could be a decrease in dominance for the best teams in the sport. The systems that used to facilitate maintaining the established pecking order could suddenly work to disrupt it.
“We’ve got to be light on our feet,” said Texas’s Sarkisian, in an interview with Pate. “It feels like on a weekly basis something new is coming, a rule change. It’s this, it’s that. And if you don’t adapt to it, the game will pass us by.”
Combine these sweeping changes with continued conference expansion, and the sport can sometimes seem unrecognizable from the one with which many fans fell in love. At SEC media days, commissioner Greg Sankey happily referred to the league as a “superconference.” The Big Ten, which stretches from New Jersey to California, can claim the same label.
Which raises the question: Does conference pride even matter anymore? Did it ever? “I am utterly fascinated with the Kentucky fan who chants S-E-C, S-E-C to an Ohio State fan when Alabama wins a championship,” says Gall. “It never made any sense to me. What does that have to do with you?” Not only that, Gall says, but, “You are rooting against your own best interests.” The teams in your own conference are the teams you’re most likely to compete against for recruits, for resources, and, of course, for position in the standings. “You’re allowing regional pride to crowd out rooting for your team’s chances of success.”
And yet. Isn’t regional pride the whole point? Isn’t that why the SEC has chosen to maintain its regional identity—despite what the Big Ten has done—even as it expands? Isn’t that what has made the league’s past two decades of dominance so satisfying not only on a competitive level, but also on a cultural one?
This is not the bicoastal Big Ten; nor is it the ACC, a conference with the word Atlantic in its name that includes two schools that sit by the Pacific Ocean. The SEC is from somewhere. You can argue about whether certain states within the league’s footprint belong to the South. (Missouri is not the South but you can trick yourself if you squint while driving along I-55; Texas might be a region unto itself, but at least Texans say y’all; even if the state of Florida is not the South, Gainesville sure as hell is.) But still. “The states in the SEC actually touch each other,” says Gall. “The food is the same, the music is the same, the weather is the same, the passion around the sport is the same.”
The sport remains the easiest way for two people from this region to connect. It’s one of the first things to come up with dads at the playground or moms in the pickup line, the easiest way to fill dead air at any birthday or cocktail party, the glue between strangers at rural gas stations or on city sidewalks. “Up until the last couple years, I viewed the SEC as sort of the South’s return to acceptable tribalism,” says Godfrey. “It’s a self-identifying totem that was culturally suitable.”
As a diehard Georgia fan, I have no problem rooting against other SEC schools—anything to avoid the inevitable gloating I hear from neighbors when Alabama, Florida, or Auburn wins it all. But any time that I’m away from the South, I find myself clinging to the idea of SEC supremacy. This, more than anything, is what people down here have in common: We know what it’s like to be condescended to by people from elsewhere. But we also know how good it feels to have this thing that everyone in the country knows is ours and (almost) ours alone.
There’s an ugly undercurrent to certain expressions of Southern pride, a hearkening back to the ugliest stains on our nation. Writing for Grantland in 2011, my colleague Bryan Curtis found plenty of examples of early 20th century sportswriters using war imagery to describe any game between southern college football teams and their northern foes. But while the South remains a place with deep fissures and deeper flaws, it is also vibrant and ever-changing. It’s a place that cherishes the ties that bind.
Godfrey points to the league’s “It Just Means More” slogan, which sounds like it was dreamed up in a Manhattan marketing firm but has roots in a deeper truth. “It’s an ownership of an eliteness, or a sense of superiority, that the South has not been associated with, post-reconstruction,” he says. “It’s about this place that’s underpopulated, underfunded, undereducated, under-everything. This place that’s made fun of. Well, we’ll whip your ass for three hours. And regardless of how we built our little war machines, of how fucked-up the personnel acquisition was, or the bag man culture, or the state of our education system or race relations or anything else, it was a moment where we could defeat you. We could defeat not only you in Ohio or Michigan or California, but also your perception of us as a culture and a people.”
As a Southerner himself, Godfrey worries less about SEC teams losing more on the field than he does about the sport losing its soul. Every time that a conference expands, that a century-old rivalry goes dormant, that big-name schools face off in a conference game that’s made to grab TV ratings but has no root in history or geography, some piece of what fans love so much about college football erodes.
“The identity of these tribes is kind of flattening out a little bit,” Godfrey says. “We’ve entered a very, very primal state of survival of the fittest.”
The biggest threat to SEC pride is not NIL, or the portal, or the new-look playoff. It’s not Ohio State, Penn State, Michigan, or Oregon. It’s a sanding down of the entire sport, a continued transformation into something ruled by television dollars and not by the localized passions that have made college football the most uniquely American sport there is.
But down here, the message remains the same as it’s been all century. For so long, it was a statement of fact. Now, it’s a declaration of self. We know how to play this sport better than the rest of y’all do. In a matter of days, we’ll begin to see if that’s still true.
