thepostgame.com - Why the SEC isn't as Great in Football as You'd Think

Anyone who pays attention and didn't start watching football in the last 5 years knows all of this.

The light of knowledge shall show you the way.

But they won more than half of the BCS games.  thanks OSU. 

Best post here in a long time, unWave...thanks.  College football is not full of hype...it IS hype (and $$$).

There are gaping holes in the reasoning of this article (if I remember correctly from when I last read it). I won’t comment on the conclusion because I suspect most people have already made up their mind on that already, but the arguments in this article are weak.  

Until the other conferences can produce national champions and win the spotlight games against the ESS EEE CEE, all of these articles seem like sour grapes. I've heard from somewhere Michigan has a primetime matchup against an SEC member soon, we should start there.

in bowl games, seems pretty good to me. Its suprising that they are tied with the big ten but this sample is larger than what the media usually looks at, which is the last couple of years. Don't forget the media will always pick those stats which prove their point but for the SEC they have actually been quite dominant in recent memory as much as we hate to admit it and look for every excuse to knock them.

If/when UM beats Alabama, watch how the WWL will start talking about how Alabama's entire D had to be replaced and that it's still early in the season and how the game didn't reflect the actual strength of the teams (UM got lucky bounces, etc.). I know people hate 'em, but this is why I think we need to give more, not less, power to the computers to pick the top teams.

The SEC is great because they rarely have to leave the south or warm climates late in the season, they oversign the hell out of kids, they sit on the huge southern HS talent pool, have lower academic standards than most Big Ten institutions, and then there are the rumors of a run-away booster climate and $500 hand shakes.  Taking this into account with some great programs with good tradition and their dominance is explained. 

The real question would be is how good would the SEC really be if they played by the same rules and ethics that the Big Ten plays with?

Just win baby.

They're good at the top of their conference. They show well in marque games, particularly bowl games. This feeds into the hype train and makes their schedules seem harder, which is how you get things like a team who lost against the only good team on the schedule, who didn't even win their division, playing for a NC.

ESPN just had an article about how the depth on the SEC teams is what makes the conference the best. Specifically they looked at the depth on Alabama and LSU's lines and the QB depth at Florida when it was Tebow, Brantley, Newton.

So basically their #1 advantage is oversigning. Once this gets reigned in it should help to level the playing field.

The SEC is top-heavy, which generates their hype.  The top of the SEC gets it done, no doubt.  They have recent NC wins against the B1G, PAC, and B12.  You can't argue against that.

What baffles me is that the Pac12 is in the same situation.  You have a few elite teams at the top - USC, Oregan, recently Stanford - and then a bunch of mush.

But unlike the SEC, the Pac12 is pounded on relentlessly for being exactly what it is . . . a mediocre conference with a couple of strong teams.  

Meanwhile the SEC is hyped as the NFL south.  Teams like Arkansas and South Carolina are in the conversation for the NC just because they are in the SEC.

First off, the middlings of the SEC are not consistently better than the middlings of other conferences, which is why you have the parity in these records.  I would argue, however, that in the last 5-6 years, the top teams of the SEC have been materially better than the top teams in all of the other conferences, except a few years of USC and maybe Oregon.  I know you guys have your conspiracy theories, but let's be real....when the top SECs go against the top others, it has been VERY once sided.

I believe that this coincides with the rise of the recruiting websites.  Before weekly showcases, recruiting websites, etc. there was a more narrow dispersal of offers.  Now, every school offers every one of the top 100 recruits in the country (for the most part).  As a result, you have head to head battles for all of the top recruits.  And while I love Michigan, you are rarely going to pull top talent out of the south (except Denard) to come up here if they have offers from the top SECs.  

From here, I would argue that the southeast has better high school football talent than the midwest / northeast.  While I think that the B1G will compete with them now that Hoke and Meyer are recruiting like jedis, leaving sparty and wisconsin with empty cupboards (I also blame parity in the B1G over the last 5-10 years for our futile efforts against the SEC elite), the southeast has more great high school football players.  Being warm and less urban than Michigan and Ohio, more kids play football...not to mention year around.  This is the same reason that basketball isnt great in the SEC, while the colder areas dominate.

I read this article and thought about the threada few weeks ago where we broke down the CBS Sports strength of schedule rankings. I threw the chart into Excel, and the Big Ten came to an average of 18, the Pac-12 was about 24, and the SEC was at 40, as I recall. There really is a disparity between the hype and the reality, but it isn't just the schedule.

I thought about comparing a couple surface things like wins and losses, so I took the SEC and Big Ten back four seasons for simplicity, and the results were still sort of intriguing - they break down along similar lines. For example, in that time frame, the SEC has one 14-game winner and two 13-game winners (the former made possible by the conference championship plus bowl format, which we only  introduced last year, of course). Each conference has had a team win 12 games once, and then after that, the Big Ten has seen 11 wins nine  times, whereas it has only been seen three times in the SEC in that period. The Big Ten also has more 9-game winners and 7-game winners, whereas the SEC has more 8-game winners and 5-game winners in the same period. Long story short, even with this very cursory statistic, the distributions are similar - both hover around an 8-5 or 7-6 average each year with a standard deviation of about 3 wins and 2 losses each  year. 

If the strength of schedule rankings are accepted as accurate, then the SEC is basically just as successful as the Big Ten, but against markedly worse competition overall. It's an interesting thing to consider, I think. Granted, the scope of this comparison is not big by any means. 

this double negative a couple of times:

I don't think there's any question that the SEC hasn't been the best football conference for a few years now,

before deciding it doesn't mean what it's intended to mean, although it has a "You can't put too much water in a nuclear reactor" kind of pliability about it.

Again, I point to the raving abouyr Alabama's NFL level defense last year, when they didn't face an offense ranked above something in the 80s all year except Arkansas (I think). Their defense was rated highly because Bama is so good.

Our defense was rated highly because the offenses in the B1G were just putrid and incapable of moving the ball on my old high school defense (Davison, MI, we were awful).

It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. They rotate winning programs just like other conferences do, and while they have a few programs at the top consistently for a decade or so (LSU, Bama), they also have the underachievers, like Georgia and Tennessee, then the rest, like SC, who pulled out a freak division title, much akin to Purdue or Northwestern winning one once a decade or so in the B1G. Just like us, they're top heavy, just with 4 big teams, (remember, they had more teams than we did for a while), and a bunch of middling squads, then the bottom feeders, like kentucky and vandy, and the Mississippis.

For us it's Usually Mich, OSU, Wiscy, and PSU that are perennial strong teams, with Purdue and Illinois and NW and Iowa and State making pushes every now and then, and then we get to the Indianas and gopherquest.

If you put B1G teams in the same poll places as SEC teams, and penalized them the same way, you'd see a lot more credit to Okie State losing last year on a day of tragedy, and Bama being properly penalized for blowing their big shot by dropping in the polls properly.