OTish - Alabama traveling to B1G country to play...Minnesota (?!?)...in 2032

Saban is already 70, so he's out-longtimed Bear Bryant who retired at 69 (the slacker).  But it does feel like Saban has a few more years left in the tank.  It does not feel like he has 10 more years left...

Saban north of the Mason Dixon line in September.

Notre Dame played the last game in the rivalry in Ann Arbor. It was a glorious monsoon annihilating by the good guys 45-14.  My buddies and I sure picked the right game to attend that season!

For the most part, yes ... but they did win a National Championship in 1960.

Stop reading ESPN.  Problem solved.

SEC is the best conference but it is not the huge gap SEC fans seem to think. If MSU and the West ever get back on track we will be right there.

I went by last year's records for the most part, but should have gerrymandered Texas A&M to play Iowa.  A&M has far more 4- and 5-stars, but those are basically the same team at this point, with Iowa a slightly better defense and A&M a slightly better offense.

Over/Under for that game: 18.5

The other day ESPN had an article talking about how college football "flows through the SEC,"

ESPN paid $3 billion for the exclusive rights to SEC games. it is in their financial interest to pump up SEC as much as possible.

The SEC is incredibly top-heavy. Now yes, those top 1-2 teams are usually far and away the best teams in the country in any given year. But once you get to that second tier of teams and below, the differences between them and many other teams throughout the country are very small. And its not like the top of the SEC rotates every year or every other year. Its always the same teams. Alabama and Georgia, or occasionally LSU. 

Teams in the middle of the pack in the Big Ten can hang with and beat teams in the middle of the pack in the SEC. Purdue beat Tennessee last year. Penn State beat Auburn (twice). Iowa nearly beat Kentucky. 

The SEC has been riding on Alabama's coattails for over a decade, and now its starting to ride on Georgia's. Maybe Tennessee is for real this year, but we'll know for sure after Saturday. But the rest of those teams? They're all flawed. They can all be beaten. Many of those teams can be beaten by Big Ten teams. But because the tippy top of the SEC is usually winning or at least playing for a national title every year, the rest of the conference tries to claim credit for it vicariously. 

I'm mixed on this. SEC has 2 programs that have been a cut above even OSU, Big Ten has 4 programs who in the CFP era weren't as good as those two but were consistently better than anyone in the SEC, except for LSU who had one great year. Beyond that tho, I think the SEC's middle goes a much longer way than the Big Ten's - MSU some years, Minnesota, Iowa, maybe Purdue, NW less than half the time. In the CFP era, IU, RU, MD, UofI, UN-L all were consistently bad. Meanwhile, in the SEC, only Vanderbilt is consistently as bad as that group of five.

As a Michigan fan, we compete with or are better than 12 SEC schools pretty consistently - so it's pretty odd to hear someone from like Ole Miss or SCAR or Tennessee going "S-E-C!" to us. But outside of the Big Ten's top 4, the mid tier programs in the Big Ten are maybe competitive with a large group of SEC schools, but the bottom of the Big Ten is much larger.

so 5 games would be within a FG of each other, 3 other games less than a TD separation (with the SEC favored 2/3), 5 games where the SEC is more than a TD favorite and one where Maryland is favored by over a TD.

That feels right - looking game by game I think Illinois may match up better than the line suggests, but yea i think overall the top of the league may be fairly competitive but the bottom would not be.