Examination of the SEC's season offers no "clue" as to why the conference is overrated--only that it is

Heading into last year’s NCAA  national championship game—in which a one-loss Alabama team for the second straight year blew out its opponent—a very good argument can be made that Notre Dame was not the best team in the country, or even the second, third or fourth best. Although it had good wins over Oklahoma and Stanford, their only other “impressive” win was against a down Michigan State team that finished the regular season 6-6. Five other wins were by a touchdown or less, two in overtime. Notre Dame’s scoring average of less than 27 points per game also signaled trouble.

In fact, despite being unbeaten, the Fighting Irish were a figment of the imagination of poll voters. After all, who didn’t want to see Notre Dame rise-up from the ashes and re-assert itself as the power it once was? Certainly ABC wanted to see that.  As it turned out, Notre Dame proved not to match-up well against Alabama; other teams no doubt would have been more competitive. 

But if Notre Dame was artificially inflated by voters, the same can be said about the SEC in the general. Who wanted to see an all-SEC national championship snooze-fest again? But that is how things “shook-up” two years ago, thanks to a BCS polling system that is more prone to “human error” than commonly thought. This is a function of the media’s assumptions of the “strength” of the SEC in general. But are these assumptions correct? The talk now is that the winner of the SEC championship game, either Auburn or Missouri (the latter of which was supposed to have an “off-year” after jumping conferences), should leapfrog Ohio State even if it wins the Big Ten championship game against Michigan State—which itself like Auburn, Missouri and Alabama is a one-loss team, but nowhere mentioned as a possible candidate.  

Let’s take a closer look at how the SEC “performed” this past season. It should be sobering business for SEC boosters and head-in-the-clouds media types. Fifth-ranked Missouri’s only “power conference” out-of-conference game was against Indiana, which they did play on the road. But Indiana’s only win against a winning team in-conference was against Penn State. Incredibly, Missouri jumped from unranked to #5 in just two weeks (all rankings mentioned here the AP poll), after beating Florida and Georgia, before dropping back to #10 after losing to South Carolina. Florida was ranked at the time, but they were outrageously overrated, losing seven straight and finishing the season 4-8. Missouri also beat an Ole Miss team that two games ago was ranked #24, but finished 7-5. Georgia is still ranked #25 despite having four losses. Missouri beat a Texas A&M team that is currently ranked #22, also despite having four losses. 

Number Three Auburn is even worse; it did not play a single non-conference team on the road. It’s only OOC game against a “power” conference team was against Washington State, barely escaping with a 31-24 win at home. WSU finished the season with a 6-6 record. Like Missouri, Auburn jumped into the AP Top-10 in mid-season in just two weeks after being unranked, beating an overrated Texas A&M team—and Florida Atlantic??? After losing to a ranked LSU team, it beat four SEC teams that were ranked—including a bizarre win over Alabama that neither team deserved to win. 

What OOC games did the SEC play to deserve to have such an inflated perception? Consider the following:

Ole Miss did beat Texas on the road. But at the time Texas was unranked and in disarray after being blown-out at BYU, and remained unranked until this past week—although they should fall back out after their next game against Baylor. 

LSU beat TCU on a neutral field. TCU was ranked #20 in the preseason poll, but dropped out after the loss and finished the season 4-8.

Mississippi State was destroyed by Oklahoma State on a neutral field.

Texas A&M did not play any OOC games on the road. It did, however, beat an SMU team from the rump of the former Big East, which finished 5-6.

Arkansas beat a 1-11 Southern Miss team at home, from a conference (CUSA) which didn’t place a single team in the Top-25. But they did beat a Rutgers team on the road that finished with a losing record.

My alma mater lost 59-14 to Oregon in Eugene, and finished the season with another losing record. Fortunately, I was, and still am, a Wisconsin Badger and Big Ten fan.

Georgia lost to #13 Clemson on the road. 

Alabama: Beat a four-loss Virginia Tech team in a “neutral site”—next door in Georgia.

South Carolina beat AAC champion UCF on the road, whose only “quality” wins were an OOC game against Penn State, and Louisville—whose only “quality” win was against 2-10 Kentucky (it is an SEC team, you see).

Swell-headed Vanderbilt: No power conference games OOC, but it did beat a 1-11 UMass team on the road. It recently canceled games against Northwestern and Ohio State, because Vanderbilt is “too smart” to play tough games like all the other “good” teams in the SEC do not.

Florida lost to unranked Miami in a “rivalry” game, and then blown into little pieces by Florida State. A preseason #10, Florida was inexplicably ranked for the first seven weeks while it went on to lose seven straight games. This example is perhaps the best evidence to show how warped the BCS standings and “strength of schedule” ratings are, when the system is manipulated by a team being over-inflated in the rankings from the start. 

Yet the SEC had five teams placed in AP Top-Ten in the preseason poll. Two (Alabama and South Carolina) are still there, while two teams that were unranked (Missouri and supposedly “down” Auburn) are in the top-five. The SEC has three teams total in the top-five, four in the top-ten, and seven in the top 25; had Ole Miss not lost to Mississippi State in its final game, it would have been eight teams. 

How is this possible? The only ranked teams that any of them beat OOC were UCF and TCU—and the latter just for opening day, going on to lose eight games. Alabama, Missouri and Auburn did not play a single OOC team that was ever ranked this season. On the other hand, SEC teams were beaten by these ranked teams: Florida State, Oklahoma State, Oregon (all embarrassing blow-outs) and Clemson—meaning that the SEC was crap against the better non-conference teams.

The BCS poll and “strength of schedule” ranking are baloney, because they are far too influenced by the over-ranking of SEC teams in the human polls; while two 8-4 SEC teams stayed in the Top-25 all year, not one of the three 8-4 Big Ten teams finished ranked.  The SEC simply did not prove they are “better” by playing a strong OOC schedule. And wouldn’t it be interesting to see SEC teams play in a bowl game in Yankee territory for a change? Maybe they’d freeze-up like Geno Smith and West Virginia did last year in the Pin Stripe Bowl, played in Yankee Stadium. 

The bottom line is that no one in the SEC deserves to jump either Ohio State or Florida State if those teams win their conference championship games. But even if one of those two does stumble, that an SEC team plays in the national championship game doesn’t necessarily mean they should be there—it just means that the SEC “fix” is in.