Why "SEC fatigue" is a real problem in college football

Last year after Alabama beat Ohio State to win its sixth national championship in 13 years, I wrote a blog piece about how the dominance of the Crimson Tide was partially the fault of the other blue bloods in college football not holding up their end of the competitive bargain.

That’s still likely true a year later for a number of reasons, but there’s a bigger problem that I missed, and it wasn’t until the Orange Bowl on New Year’s Eve that I saw the error of my ways.

When I wrote the piece about how schools like Michigan, Florida and USC weren’t treating their programs like football factories, I was angry after a 2-4 disaster in Ann Arbor in the COVID shortened season of 2020. The perpetual underachievement of my football program had gotten to me and I was lashing out.

But now, writing this piece, Michigan finished the 2021 season with a 12-2 record, its first win over Ohio State in 10 years in dominant fashion, and a Big Ten championship, all of which earned it the school’s first ever berth in the College Football Playoff as the No. 2 seed.

The Orange Bowl against Georgia should have been a more competitive matchup. It wasn’t. Not even close.

We watched all of the trainwreck that night as the Bulldogs soundly put Michigan in its midwestern place with a 34-11 trouncing that was never close, not even when J.J. McCarthy, our vaunted 5-star savior at QB according to many in our fanbase, came into the game in the second half.

No, Michigan fans. They would not have made the game closer or won it if J.J. had started or played sooner. Be realistic, please.

The problem is almost never as easy as who is at QB for a team, especially in college. QBs can be game changers and elevate an entire team, no question about that, but when you get to the CFP you got to have the whole package at all 22 positions on the field, and this time it was clear that Michigan was missing something, even after a 12-win campaign, that Georgia had in spades.

Talent. 5-star talent to be exact. Across the entire field.

That’s what seriously helped walk-on QB Stetson Bennett to earn the starting job over J.T. Daniels, despite the Georgia fanbase thinking otherwise, and enabled the Bulldogs to crush Michigan and then finally slay the Nick Saban dragon in Alabama 33-18 to claim Georgia’s first national title since 1980, in a game that was a rematch of the SEC Championship Game just a month earlier.

That’s when it became clear that the problem isn’t simply the mindset of the other blue bloods in college football. It’s also the SEC’s dominance against the entire rest of the country. In ALL facets.

This goes beyond Saban’s ridiculous dynasty in Tuscaloosa as well. In fact, since 2006 the SEC has won 12 of the past 16 national championships in football. Alabama has won half of those, Florida and LSU have both won two, Auburn has one in 2010 with Cam Newton at QB, and now Kirby Smart’s Georgia team.

Florida State in 2013, Ohio State in 2014, and Clemson twice in 2016 and 2018 is all the rest of the nation has to speak of for national titles for more than a decade and a half.

Compare that to the previous 16 seasons when 15 different schools claimed national titles from 1990 to 2005. Granted it was a different time and split championships were absolutely a thing, even in the BCS era, but still you had every Power 5 conference in the actual mix. Even the Pac-12, which had Washington win a split title in 1991 and Pete Carroll’s USC squad win twice with a split title in 2003 and an outright championship the following year.

The vice grip that the SEC has built on college football’s ultimate prize since Urban Meyer’s Florida won the title in 2006 has been staggering, impressive, and utterly dominating…but now it’s getting tiresome.

Do the other college football blue bloods like USC, Florida State and certainly Michigan have to change their mindsets? Absolutely. With the onset of NIL and the transfer portal, anyone that works for these football programs and still says things like “we’re going to win the right way,” should be fired immediately. That part of my sentiment on treating college football as the billion-dollar minor league for the NFL that it is, hasn’t changed.

The bigger issue now is that the SEC has a stranglehold on 5-star talent, specifically in the southern states, and they’re still going across the country to Texas, California and the midwest and taking all the 5-star talent from those regions as well. Even if a school like Michigan does change its mindset, how can it compete with Bama, Georgia and the like for the sheer amount of depth in 5-star talent?

First they’ll tell you that stars don’t matter, player development does, and if that were truly the case then Michigan wouldn’t have been thumped as soundly as it was in the Orange Bowl, and Cincinnati would have put up more of a fight against Bama in the Cotton Bowl. Neither happened. As great as those teams were this past season, they simply didn’t match physically with the SEC’s players, and once again the pollsters were rewarded for putting Georgia at No. 1 to start the season and keeping them there all year until Bama beat them, only to have the Bulldogs win the national title rematch. They knew what many of the rest of us didn’t fully know until it was too late.

Then they’ll tell you “Ohio State” is the answer, and while it’s very true that the Buckeyes have been in full football factory mode for a long time, complete with Top 5 recruiting classes in multiple seasons, they still haven’t won a national title in 8 years, and have been thumped just as soundly by the likes of Bama and even Clemson in the CFP ever since. They are not the exception to the rule that many in the midwest think they are, despite all the talent they bring in.

But why is it a serious problem that the SEC is this dominant? Isn’t this just sour grapes from a Michigan fan whose team got rolled by the one that “it just means more” to?

Well, you could ask the audience why it’s a problem. 22.6 million watched the Bama-Georgia rematch, which was good for second-lowest ratings since the CFP format started in 2015.

But it was a 19 percent increase from the previous season! Yes, because last year was the lowest ratings.

Don’t even think of comparing any of this to national NFL ratings either, which went up 10 percent from 2020 are at its highest viewership ratings in six years. Draft Kings and NFL betting in general has a big part in that, but still.

The rest of the country is making it clear that SEC fatigue is real, and while we can’t count on any sort of regulation on recruiting, NIL enforcement or competitive balance in college football, it’s pretty clear that fans and viewers want to see helmets from others conferences more consistently in the national championship picture. The idea that the rest of us have to settle for conference titles and that’s it doesn’t sit well with respect to interest in the sport.

If you’re an SEC fan and you think that other fanbases or the audience for college football doesn’t matter, you’d be gravelly mistaken. Money rules the game on all sides and the advertisers that spent a bundle on those CFP games can’t be too happy that fewer people were seeing their advertisements because they’re tired of seeing Bama or Insert SEC Team Here winning it all. Again.

Maybe NIL is the great equalizer, but even then it comes down to whose boosters are willing to pay more for 5-star recruits, and once someone outside of the SEC does it for a year or two, how long before Bama, Georgia, Texas A&M or someone else in the talent-rich south bounces right back to do it bigger? There may be no answer in sight to the end of this SEC dominance, except the eventual retirement of Nick Saban, and even at that point the monster he created in the conference could be big enough to stand on its own after he leaves.

The NCAA better hope the rest of the country still cares enough to watch at that point.