SEC's Quest for a Football Playoff Is Quite the Irony

From the campaigning of UF President Bernie Machen and Urban Meyer in late 2006 and UGA President Michael Adams in early 2008, to Mike Slive's plus-one proposal this year, the most vocal proponents for having a playoff in college football have come from the SEC.  I find that quite ironic.

You see, back in 2004 Auburn was shut out of the national championship game in favor of USC and Oklahoma.

OU had just won a national championship in 2000, had been to the title game the previous year, and fielded former Heisman Trophy winner Jason White at quarterback.  USC won the AP national title the previous year and had the player who would win that year's Heisman Trophy in Matt Leinart.

In the court of public opinion, and in the AP and Coaches’ opinion polls, those were the two best teams.  Tough luck, Auburn.

Once that happened, the SEC and its fans unleashed an unofficial public relations onslaught.  People have long debated which conference is the best, but the fervor really ramped up after that 2004 season.  The people who started the full-blown conference wars were also the ones who steered it, unflinchingly campaigning in favor of their league.

After all, the only way to prevent one of their own from getting left out again was to indoctrinate everyone with the perception that the SEC is the best conference in the country (which maybe was debatable then, but is not now).  Once the country believes that 11 wins in the SEC are worth more than 11 wins from anywhere else, there shouldn’t be any more SEC teams left out in the cold.

In a bit of providence, this was also around the time that the SEC got a whole lot tougher.  Urban Meyer and Les Miles would come in, Steve Spurrier and David Cutcliffe would come back, and eventually even Nick Saban would come back into the fold.

Rich Brooks would get Kentucky turned around, Bobby Johnson would change Vanderbilt from a doormat into a plucky and competitive team, and Sylvester Croom began his rebuilding job that culminated in a bowl win this year.

Now you have Bobby Petrino finally coming to the conference, something he’s been trying to do for years.

While the braggadocio of the SEC waxed, the conference itself became a lot more difficult of a place to play to match its thesis.

Now, it’s mission accomplished.  The SEC is perceived to be the best conference in the country by most, and 11 wins in it actually do count more than 11 wins elsewhere.  You can see that through the selections of Florida over Michigan in 2006, and LSU over USC, Oklahoma, and others in 2007 for the BCS championship game.

It basically guarantees that if the SEC champ finishes undefeated or with one loss, that team will make the national title game, provided that it doesn’t finish with a loss while two other BCS conference champs go undefeated (though perhaps not necessarily).  The SEC beat the system and won the poll game.

That’s the irony.  No conference is set up nearly as well to win in the current system than the SEC is.  Single teams from other conferences (USC, Oklahoma, Texas, Ohio State, etc.) have national power auras under the right circumstances, but no other conference can produce a champion that will automatically be seen as one of the nation’s top two or three teams.

It just seems odd that the conference that is so uniquely suited to winning under the current system would be the most interested in seeing it overthrown.

 

---

For the record, I am also in favor of a playoff.  It is for philosophical reasons and is completely beside the point that, for the purpose of bringing home national championships, the current system benefits my school's conference more than any other.