In college football it is widely accepted the Southeastern Conference is the best.
Seven straight national championships is hard to argue with, especially when six of those title games have been by double digits.
But the argument that the SEC is the deepest conference in America because any team can beat any team doesn’t seem to be realistic.
From the start of the 2012 season until last Friday, the top six teams in the SEC based on their conference record: Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, Alabama, Louisiana and Texas A&M had a combined total of one loss to the bottom eight teams in the conference.
Now after five of those teams lost to lower tier SEC squads – LSU to Ole Miss, Texas A&M to Auburn, South Carolina to Tennessee, Florida to Missouri and Georgia to Vanderbilt – the conference is being touted as the deepest in America.
That just doesn’t seem logical, you cannot go from being blatantly top heavy to ultra deep just because the stars lined up one weekend and a bunch of teams lost.
One week simply does not make a deep conference.
If things continue along this trend and the top teams continue to falter then maybe that argument could be made, but for now, it doesn’t have enough merit.
Even if you look at the SEC’s national titles over its collective run of dominance it is top heavy. Of the four championships won since Florida claimed their second in 2008-09, Alabama has won the title three times, with arch-rival Auburn being the only team to unseat them.
And after the BCS rankings were released Sunday, the Crimson Tide, ranked No. 1, look poised to bring home another this year.
If you are a league that supposedly boasts parity then shouldn’t those championships be more spread out? Wouldn’t you expect a team like Georgia or Texas A&M to contend for a championship?
Last season the argument was made that the Big Ten conference was made up of Ohio State, who could not participate in the postseason because of sanctions stemming from tattoo-gate, and then everyone else.
Couldn’t you make the same argument with Alabama this season?
Sure, until someone manages to unseat the SEC as reigning national champions they will remain as the class of college football. But the conference doesn’t need the added hype making it seem better than it is.
The gap in talent between conferences is closing, but until the SEC is brought back down to earth things will remain as they are in college football.
